He had not seemed to regret being born in Paris, but he seemed agreeably impressed by America when he was taken there at the age of six weeks. Feeling himself restored to a land of republican freedom, he began to feel at liberty to unfold his hitherto concealed resources. He began by giving less time to sleep and more to agreeable, though inarticulate, conversation. He began to sit up and look around him with soft, shadowy, and peculiarly thoughtful eyes. The expression—the dear little dreamy, reflective expression—of his eyes was his most valuable possession. It was a capital. It attracted the attention of his immediate relatives and ensnared them into discussing his character and wondering what he was thinking of. His eyes were brown, and having heard their color remarked on in a complimentary manner, he, with great artistic presence of mind, stealthily applied himself to developing upon his hitherto bald head golden hair with a curl in it. It was his mamma who first discovered this. She was lying upon a grassy slope, playing with him, and holding him up in the sunlight at arm’s length; she saw in the brightness a sort of faint little nimbus of gold crowning him. “Oh, the Lammie day!” she cried out. (“Lammie day” is not in the dictionary; it was a mere maternal inspiration.) “See what he is doing now! He is putting out a lovely little golden fuzz all over his head, and there is a tiny curl at the ends—like little duck-tails! He has asked somebody or something, perhaps a fairy, what kind of hair I like with brown eyes, and he is doing it on purpose.” It seemed not improbable that, on inquiring into her character before selecting her, he had grounded himself thoroughly in the matter of her tastes, and had found that an insistent desire for a certain beauty in the extremely young was one of her weaknesses also. From his earliest hours he considered her. He had not anticipated walking alone at nine months old, but in their intimate moments he discovered she had really set her heart upon his doing so. “Your brother walked alone beautifully when he was nine months old,” she would remark, “and if you wait until you are ten months old I shall feel that you have dishonored your family and brought my reddish hair with sorrow to the grave.” This being the case, he applied himself to making determined, if slow, little pilgrimages upon the carpet on his hands and knees. His reward was that the first time he essayed this he was saluted with cries of adulation and joy, notwithstanding the fact that his attempt was rather wabbly in character, and its effect was marred by his losing his balance and rolling over in a somewhat ignominious manner.