Presently, however, she relieved my mind entirely, for she showed a marriage-ring by drawing off a glove, and hauling out a baby--not out of the glove mind you, but out of her dress somewhere. I gave a sigh of relief, for there was cause and effect at once--a marriage-ring and a baby. I had in my own mind grievously wronged the virtuous lady, so I immediately elevated my prostrate form, rubbed my eyes, yawned, stretched myself, looked at my watch, and in fact behaved entirely like a gentleman just awakened from a pleasant nap. After I had benignly eyed her sleeping progeny for the space of half a minute, I remarked blandly, and with a soft smile, "Pretty baby, ma'am." (I thought it as ugly as sin.) "Yes, sir," said she, looking pleasedly at it with one eye (so have I seen a cock contemplate a bantam chick). "It is so like its papa!" "Is it indeed, ma'am? Well, now, do you know, I thought it just the very image of its mamma!" "So he thinks," replied the lady; "but he has only seen its carte-de-visite." "Unfortunate father!" thought I, "to have seen only the shadowy image of this his darling child--its carte-de-visite, too! wonder, now, if it makes a great many calls? shouldn't like the little cuss to visit me." "Going far, ma'am?" said I aloud. And now this queer specimen of femininity raised her head from the study of her sleeping babe, and looked me full in the face, as if she were only aware of my presence for the first time, and hadn't spoken to me at all. I am proud to say I bore the scrutiny nobly, though it occupied several very long seconds, during which time I did not disgrace my certificate of virtue by the ghost of a blush, till, seeming satisfied, she replied, apparently in deep thought,--"To Lon--don." "So am I, ma'am." "I go on to Plymouth," she said. "I expect to go there myself soon," said I. "I am going abroad to join my husband." "Very strange!" said I, "and _I_ hope to go abroad soon to join my," (she looked at me now, with parted lips, and the first rays of a rising smile lighting up her face, expecting me to add "wife")--"to join my ship;" and she only said "Oh!" rather disappointedly I thought, and recommenced the contemplation of the moonfaced babe. "Bah!" thought I, "there is nothing in you but babies and matrimony;" and I threw myself on the cushions, and soon slept in earnest, and dreamt that the Director-General, in a bob-wig and drab shorts, was dancing Jacky-tar on the quarter-deck of a seventy-four, on the occasion of my being promoted to the dignity of Honorary-Surgeon to the Queen--a thing that is sure to happen some of these days.