she delicious? Will she not make a sensation? She will carry all before her!” I’d have given the world for a clear head, just to think about my mistress, and the Honorable Mr. Francis, and that horrid old Maud, who ought to be burnt for a witch, as she is. My mistress was obliged to get her own bonnet and shawl; and indeed, when she went out, she had not strength to come in, only that the Honorable Mr. Francis helped her. At last the day came: I had been up stairs to my lady, and found she had gone down stairs to breakfast!--there was a wonder!--and returning through the back hall, I saw two such pretty looking children, all in rags, not real natural rags, such as we see (I am sure I ought to know what rags are,) but nice, pretty, clean, pink gingham frocks, with pieces cut out of them on purpose--torn down here, and looped up there--and their clean, pretty white legs and feet quite bare, and their dear little, sweet, fat, fubsy hands filled with _artificial_ flowers, poppies, and ears of corn. Well, aunt, you know how I doat on children; so as I just stooped down to kiss them, as I used poor Tom’s, and it seemed so natural to say to the youngest, who was hardly bigger than a Clonmel turf--“O! lanna machree was you, every bit of you”--when I heard a scream of delight from the Honorable Mrs. James: it was like the _skirle_ of a paycock. “You dear creature!” she shouted, “to get up such a delicious rehearsal; the very thing I wanted. Your dress is quite ready; Clotilde shall dress you. You must talk Irish unceasingly, it will prove the extensive charity we propose--that we mean to take in _even the Irish_. It is a bold stroke, but this is the period for bold strokes.” And so she talked and hustled me into a room, and the children with me; and before I could turn round (I had not had a bit of breakfast that day, and was starving alive with the hunger) she had my cap off, and my hair down about my shoulders, and my gown off, and a bran new bright scarlet petticoat, that (saving your presence) was half a mile too short, cut into a scollop here, and a scollop there, and a bright blue patch tacked on it here, and a green one there; and the body of a gown that did not half fit, in the same style, with folds of _white muslin_ for shift-sleeves; and a bran new blue cloak, with such a beautiful pink bow in the back of the hood, and--the wickedness of her--to tare two or three slits in _that_. I was so bothered entirely, that I could not speak; and then the maid tossicated my hair, and stuck a bunch of shamroques over my ear, and placed one of the children in my arms (the _grawleen_ of a thing got hers about my neck in a minute;) and every now and then the Honorable Mrs. James would stop and clap her hands, and talk that outlandish gibberish to her maid.