“Yes,” broke in Barbara, “and she won’t let Essie and Ellie teach their dolls their lessons! She was quite cross when I was showing them how, and said it was all nonsense when I told her I heard you say that I half taught myself by teaching Juliet. And so the poor dolls have no advantages, mother, and are quite stupid for want of education,” pursued the little girl, indignantly. “They aren’t people, but only dolls, and Essie and Ellie can’t do anything with them but just dress them and take them out walking.” “That’s what they would wish to make Babie like!” said her elder sister. “But you’ll not let anybody teach me but you, dear, dear Mother Carey,” entreated the child. “No, indeed, my little one.” And just then the boys came rushing in to their evening meal, full of the bird’s nest that they had been visiting in their uncle’s field, and quite of opinion that Kenminster was “a jolly place.” “And then,” added Jock, “we got the garden engine, and had such fun, you don’t know.” “Yes,” said Bobus, “till you sent a whole cataract against the house, and that brought out her Serene Highness!” The applicability of the epithet set the whole family off into a laugh, and Jock further made up a solemn face, and repeated-- “Buff says Buff to all his men, And I say Buff to you again. Buff neither laughs nor smiles, But carries his face With a very good grace.” It convulsed them all, and the mother, recovering a little, said, “I wonder whether she ever can laugh.” “Poor Aunt Ellen!” said Babie, in all her gravity; “she is like King Henry I. and never smiled again.” And with more wit than prudence, Mrs. Buff, her Serene Highness, Sua Serenita, as Janet made it, became the sobriquets for Aunt Ellen, and were in continual danger of oozing out publicly. Indeed the younger population at Kencroft probably soon became aware of them, for on the next half-holiday Jock crept in with unmistakable tokens of combat about him, and on interrogation confessed, “It was Johnnie, mother. Because we wanted you to come out walking with us, and he said ‘twas no good walking with one’s mother, and I told him he didn’t know what a really jolly mother was, and that his mother couldn’t laugh, and that you said so, and he said my mother was no better than a tomboy, and that she said so, and so--” And so, the effects were apparent on Jock’s torn and stained collar and swelled nose. But the namesake champions remained unconvinced, except that Johnnie may have come over to the opinion that a mother no better than a tomboy was not a bad possession, for the three haunted the “Folly” a good deal, and made no objection to their aunt’s company after the first experiment.