“I wish I was in the Army myself, if the child’s in the right,” said Mrs. Tetterby, looking at her husband, “for I have no peace of my life here. I’m a slave—a Virginia slave:” some indistinct association with their weak descent on the tobacco trade perhaps suggested this aggravated expression to Mrs. Tetterby. “I never have a holiday, or any pleasure at all, from year’s end to year’s end! Why, Lord bless and save the child,” said Mrs. Tetterby, shaking the baby with an irritability hardly suited to so pious an aspiration, “what’s the matter with her now?” Not being able to discover, and not rendering the subject much clearer by shaking it, Mrs. Tetterby put the baby away in a cradle, and, folding her arms, sat rocking it angrily with her foot. “How you stand there, ’Dolphus,” said Mrs. Tetterby to her husband. “Why don’t you do something?” “Because I don’t care about doing anything,” Mr. Tetterby replied. “I am sure _I_ don’t,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “I’ll take my oath _I_ don’t,” said Mr. Tetterby. A diversion arose here among Johnny and his five younger brothers, who, in preparing the family breakfast table, had fallen to skirmishing for the temporary possession of the loaf, and were buffeting one another with great heartiness; the smallest boy of all, with precocious discretion, hovering outside the knot of combatants, and harassing their legs. Into the midst of this fray, Mr. and Mrs. Tetterby both precipitated themselves with great ardour, as if such ground were the only ground on which they could now agree; and having, with no visible remains of their late soft-heartedness, laid about them without any lenity, and done much execution, resumed their former relative positions. “You had better read your paper than do nothing at all,” said Mrs. Tetterby. “What’s there to read in a paper?” returned Mr. Tetterby, with excessive discontent. “What?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “Police.” “It’s nothing to me,” said Tetterby. “What do I care what people do, or are done to?” “Suicides,” suggested Mrs. Tetterby. “No business of mine,” replied her husband. “Births, deaths, and marriages, are those nothing to you?” said Mrs. Tetterby. “If the births were all over for good, and all to-day; and the deaths were all to begin to come off to-morrow; I don’t see why it should interest me, till I thought it was a coming to my turn,” grumbled Tetterby. “As to marriages, I’ve done it myself. I know quite enough about _them_.” To judge from the dissatisfied expression of her face and manner, Mrs. Tetterby appeared to entertain the same opinions as her husband; but she opposed him, nevertheless, for the gratification of quarrelling with him. “Oh, you’re a consistent man,” said Mrs. Tetterby, “an’t you? You, with the screen of your own making there, made of nothing else but bits of newspapers, which you sit and read to the children by the half-hour together!”