"Besides, one has only to look at you two together to say--that is the block, and this the chip. The same long limbs, the same build--put you in the same clothes, and look at you from behind, and not one man in ten could say which was which. Of course, what is grown dark and grey and grizzled in him, is carried out in pink and white and yellow with you--the colouring must have been your mother's; and a deuced pretty woman she was, the old porter says. He saw her once, not long before she died; he had to take some money to her--on the sly, of course; since then he has never been able to forget her, he says, and that his master felt so spooney about her, he can't wonder at; far rather, that he could give her up, and marry the wife he did--our charming Mamsell's sister, you know; the two sisters were totally different in everything--except the tin, which was the same. I rather think the Meister must have had a try at the younger sister first, and been rejected; she was a haughty 'Frölen' even then, you see; and so he turned to the other sister, who was neither haughty nor handsome, and so she took him. However, I suppose she wouldn't, if she had but known of your own sweet self--you were just beginning to run about in your first little boots--and had known that her precious husband used, as often as he could get away, to go and have a peep at his former family about three or four times a year, on his business journeys. It was all kept so cosy, that not a soul ever heard of it. A sly fox your governor was--excuse the candour of the remark. But sly he must have been in this business, if you really did live so long without ever having smelt a rat; and in other respects you are as quick a lad as may be. His wife, however, somehow or other, in time did smell it, and hunted it down, and there was the devil to pay and all, as you may fancy. She kept the keys of the strong box, so of course it lay in her power to stop his business-travelling, and she did. More fool she! for it could not tend to improve his temper, you know; and at last, when a letter came--was it a letter, or the porter?--to say that your mother was ill and dying, and past recovery, you can imagine that the governor was not disposed to stand on ceremony. He started off alone, and did not come back for three weeks and more; he had not written either--what could he have written about her illness to his wife? Of course, the worst news of the one, were the best to the other. However, he did come back at last; and she might have lived in peace now that the other woman was dead and buried; only she couldn't. And there was the greatest row of all when one day he came home and surprised her with a little present--orphan or foundling, or whatever he was pleased to call you,--she might be as fractious as she would, the child was there, and there was nothing to be done but to be cruel to it.