I never knew such a boy to wait at dinner. In the parlour, of course, he was on his best behaviour, because he knew Mr. Sk--n--st--n was there, (a deceitful young imp!); but only let him have to fetch up any dishes from the kitchen, and there I knew he’d be, as plainly as if I saw him, dipping his fingers in them, and sucking them again all the way up stairs. If by any chance I had an open-work jam tart, bless you, to table it would come with all the marks of the tips of his fingers in the jam, till it looked exactly like the japanned tin boxes in a lawyer’s office; or if it was a pie, there it would be, picked all round the edges, as if rats had been gnawing it; and no matter how much pounded lump sugar I had given out to sprinkle over the crust, when it came up there wouldn’t be so much as a grain on the top of it. Indeed, I never came near such a boy for sugar as that was; lump after lump would he steal out of my poor dear little canary’s cage as fast as I put it in; and once I recollect when my beautiful Kate had the red-gum so bad, and I packed Wittals off for our medical adviser, telling him to make all the haste he could or our doctor would have left to make his morning visits, the young monkey was gone better than an hour, though the house is only a stone’s throw from ours. This made me so wild, that directly I heard his sneaking ring at the bell, I rushed to the door and seized hold of him by both arms to give him a good shaking, when, bless me, if he wasn’t as sticky all over as a lollypop, and when I examined him a little more, I declare his clothes were all over molasses and brown sugar from head to foot; and then it turned out that my young Turk had been making one of a party of urchins inside an empty sugar-cask, and that in my _dress livery_, too. His knees and his back were literally caked all over with the nasty brown gluey stuff, and he had got it all sticking round his mouth, and cheeks, and chin, till his face looked like so much sand-paper.