Three nights after Christmas was mild and open, and I was watching a busy little set of fingers prepare the tea, while my uncle was napping in his easy-chair, with a yellow silk handkerchief spread over his face. I had been whispering very earnestly, while all my impressive words had been treated as if airy nothings; and more than once I had been most decidedly snubbed. I was at last sitting with a very lachrymose countenance, looking appealingly at the stern little tyrant, who would keep looking so bewilderingly pretty by trying to frown with a beautiful little white brow that would not wrinkle, when the parlour-maid came up and announced Browsem. "No, sir," muttered my uncle; "I'll put a stop--stop--" the rest was inaudible. "The keeper waits to see you, uncle dear," whispered his late sister's child, in her soft kittenish way. "Keeper, sir; yes, sir, I'll give him--Bless my heart, Jenny," exclaimed the old gentleman starting up, dragging off his handkerchief and bringing the hair down over his forehead; "bless my heart, Jenny, why I was almost asleep." "Here's Browsem, uncle," I said. "Show him up; show him up," cried my uncle, who would not have accorded more attention to an ambassador than he did to his keeper--that gentleman being prime minister to his pleasures. Browsem was shown up--a process which did not become the keeper at all, for he came in delicately as to pace, not appearance, and held his red cotton handkerchief in his hand, as if in doubt whether to employ it in dabbing his damp brow, or to spread upon the carpet for fear that his boots might soil the brightness. "Now Browsem," cried the old gentleman, as the keeper was pulling his forelock to Miss Jenny, thereby making the poor fellow start and stammer. "Now Browsem, whom have you caught?" "Caught, sir? No one, sir, only the cat, sir. Ponto run her down, but she skretched one of his eyes a'most out." "Cat; what cat?" said my uncle, leaning forward, with a hand upon each arm of the chair. "Why, you see, sir," said Browsem, confidentially, "there's a dodge in it;" and then the man turned round and winked at me. "Confound you; go on," cried my uncle in a most exasperated tone of voice, when Browsem backed against Jenny's little marqueterie work-table, and, oversetting it, sent bobbins, tapes, reels, wools, silks, and, crochet and tatting apparatus into irremediable chaos. "There, never mind that trash," shouted the old man; "speak up at once." "Well, sir," said Browsem, "they've been a-dodgin' of me." "Well?" cried my uncle. "Tied a lanthorn to a cat's neck, and sent her out in the open, to make belief as it were a dog driving the partridges." "Well?" "And we've been a-hunting it for long enew, and Ponto ketched her at last." "Well?" "And this was only to get us outer the way, for I heard a gun down Bunkin's Spinney." "Well?" shouted my uncle. "And I've come to know what's right to be done."