Page:Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal, t. II.djvu/83

 What is he doing?' quoth the imprudent mother.

He is making proots,' replied the urchin, innocently, in a high treble, loud enough to be heard by everyone in the room.

"Can you imagine the feelings of the mother, or those of the wife, when, a few moments afterwards, her husband came into the room? Well, the poor man told me that he almost regarded himself as a branded man, when his blushing wife told him of his child's indiscretion. Still, had he committed a crime?

"Who is the man that, at least once in his lifetime, has not felt a perfect satisfaction in breaking wind, or, as the child onomatopoetically expressed it, making a 'proot?' What was there, then, to be ashamed of; that surely was no crime against nature?

"The fact is that now-a-days we have got to be so mealy-mouthed, so over-nice, that Madame Eglantine, who 'raught full semely after her meat' would be looked upon, in spite of her stately manners, as something worse than a scullery-maid. We have become so demurely