“Nancy Pansy” was what Middleburgh called her, though the parish register of baptism contained nothing nearer the name than that of one Anne, daughter of Baylor Seddon, Esq., and Ellenor his wife. Whatever the register may have thought about it, “Nancy Pansy” was what Middleburgh called her, and she looked so much like a cherub, with her great eyes laughing up at you and her tangles blowing all about her dimpling pink face, that Dr. Spotswood Hunter, or “the Old Doctor,” as he was known to Middleburgh, used to vow she had gotten out of Paradise by mistake that Christmas Eve. Nancy Pansy was the idol of the old doctor, as the old doctor was the idol of Middleburgh. He had given her a doll baby on the day she was born, and he always brought her one on her birthday, though, of course, the first three or four which he gave her were of rubber, because as long as she was a little girl she used to chew her doll after a most cannibal-like fashion, she and Harry’s puppies taking turn and turn about at chewing in the most impartial and friendly way. Harry was the old doctor’s son. As she grew a little older, however, the doctor brought her better dolls; but the puppies got older faster than Nancy Pansy, and kept on chewing up her dolls, so they did not last very long, which, perhaps, was why she never had a “real live doll,” as she called it. Some people said the reason the old doctor was so fond of Nancy Pansy was because he had been a lover of her beautiful aunt, whose picture as Charity giving Bread to the Poor Woman and her Children was in the stained-glass window in the church, with the Advent angel in the panel below, to show that she had died at Christmas-tide and was an angel herself now; some said it was because he had had a little daughter himself who had died when a wee bit of a girl, and Nancy Pansy reminded him of her; some said it was because his youngest born, his boy Harry, with the light hair, who now commanded a company in the Army of Northern Virginia, was so fond of Nancy Pansy’s lovely sister Ellen; some said it was because the old doctor was fond of all children; but the old doctor said it was “because Nancy Pansy was Nancy Pansy,” and looked like an angel, and had more sense than anybody in Middleburgh, except his old sorrel horse Slouch, who, he always maintained, had sense enough to have prevented the war if he had been consulted.