“He is creeping!” his mamma said. “He has begun to creep! He is going to walk as soon as Lionel did!” and everything available in the form of an audience was gathered together in the room, to exult with acclamations over the enrapturing spectacle of a small thing dragging its brief white frock and soft plump body, accompanied and illumined by a hopeful smile, over a nursery carpet. “He is so original!” his unprejudiced parent exclaimed, with fine discrimination. “He’s creeping, of course, and babies have crept before, but he gives it a kind of air, as if he had invented it, and yet was quite modest.” Her discrimination with regard to his elder brother had been quite as fine. There were even persons who regarded her as being prejudiced by undue affection. It has never been actually proved that the aspirant for pedestrian honors had privately procured a calendar and secreted it for daily reference as to the passage of time, but if this were not the case, it was really by a rather singular coincidence that the day before his ninth month was completed he arrested his creeping over the carpet, and, dragging himself up by a chair to a standing position, covered himself with glory by staggering, flushed, uncertain, but triumphant, at least six steps across the floor unaided and alone. He was snatched up and kissed until he was breathless. He was ruffled and tumbled with delightful little shakes and ecstatic little hugs. He bore it all with the modest composure of a conqueror, who did not deign trivial airs and graces. His cheeks were warm and pink; he made no remark whatever, but there was in his eyes a soft, coy little smile which only a person of his Machiavellian depth of character could have accomplished. By that time, by adroit machinations and an unbounded knowledge of human weakness, he had assured his position in the respectable family of which he had chosen to become a member. It would have been impossible to oust him, or to work upon the feelings of his relatives in any such manner as would have induced them to listen for a moment to any animadversions upon his conduct. His eyelashes, his indefinite features, his totter, his smile, were considered to become matters of the most thrilling national importance. On the magnificent occasion when he first decided to follow his mamma up-stairs, and consequently applied himself to the rather prolonged and serious athletic task of creeping up step by step on his dusty little hands and soft knees, and electrifying her by confronting her, when she turned and saw him, with a sweetly smiling and ardent little upturned face—on that occasion it seemed really that it could only be by the most remarkable oversight that there were not columns of editorials on the subject in the London _Times_.