So it was ever with this gruesome infant. Its presentment, or that of some part of it, haunted Ned through every course of an attenuated cuisine. The butter would exhibit a mould of its features, the milk-jug a print of its lips. The rolls appeared indented with suspicious crescents in the crusty parts; the omelettes confessed a flavour, and often an impression, of a small sticky hand. The creature itself, moreover, was a shockingly ubiquitous Puck. It was always being mislaid, as was everything portable in the house. Its shrill waking cry would issue from the depths of the lodger’s bed, into which it had burrowed with a precocious sense of the humour of appropriation; its red face rise suddenly, like an October moon, from behind a cloud of sacking on the floor. It was brought up with the fagots, and ran some narrow risks of premature cremation; it was included in the week’s washing, and its little fat stomach menaced with a flat-iron. Sometimes, when one opened a cupboard, it would fall out in company with half-a-dozen plates; sometimes madame would deposit it on a table, and, forgetting that she had done so, would heap it with casual litter as she transacted her domestic business. “No doubt,” Ned thought, “it is destined to eventual immolation in a pasty.” Indeed, his nerves were always on the jump when there was cooking forward--a lively knowledge of which fact he could by no means evade. For the process being conducted on the floor above his head, and it being customary with madame to let everything boil over, it became a familiar experience with him to see successive samples of his _menu_ appear and hang in sebaceous drops from a certain seasoned patch on the ceiling, whence in time they would contribute their quota of peril to a perfect little slide of grease that had formed on the boards below. Then, at such a stage, it would be not unusual for his landlady to come into view, pledge-on-arm, at the door, her _borné_ face irradiated with some eagerness of triumph. “But only think, monsieur!” she would begin. “Pardon,” Ned would interpose; “but is it well for the child to be gnawing that great lump of cheese?” “Cheese! _Oh, mon Dieu_! I must have put it on the trencher, thinking it was bread, and he has taken it, the thief!” Then the lodger must discipline his impatience, while the comestible changed hands, to a shrill clamour, the infant finally being deposited outside the door like boots to be cleaned. “Only think, monsieur!” cries the lady again; “the delicate _compote_ I could have sworn to having prepared for monsieur’s dinner a week ago, when monsieur, nevertheless, had to go fasting for an _entremet_! I was right; it was made, and it was not stolen. This morning I find it thrust to the very back of the oven--baked for a week, and no more eatable than a brigadier’s wig.”