Page:Piccino and Other Child Stories (1897).djvu/101



THERE never were another like him, that's certain. I've seen a good many young gentlemen in my day, being in the army, and under officers as was what you may call swells, and had families of their own, some of them, but I never saw a young gentleman as could hold a candle to Master Lionel; no, nor as were fit to black his boots, for the matter of that. And I knew him, too, from the time he were a young gentleman in long clothes, being carried about in his ayah's arms, and many's the time I've carried him myself, and been proud to do it. I had no children of my own, though I'd always been taken with them. I wasn't a married man, and knew I never should be, for that matter, after curly-headed little Maggie Shea died of the fever that blazing hot year when the disease was like a plague among us. She'd given me her promise only a week before; and I never saw the woman I wanted after her. Sometimes I've thought I was fonder of the children because of it. She had been fond of them, and like a little mother she was to the seven