"_Médiâni!_" Flutter-Duck would begin. "_Médiâni!_" little Rachel would lisp in her piping voice. It was two words, but Flutter-Duck imagined it was one. She gave the syllables in recitative, the _âni_ just two notes higher than the _médi_, and she accented them quite wrongly. When Rachel first grew articulate, Flutter-Duck was so overjoyed to hear the little girl echoing her, that she would often turn to her husband with an exclamation of "Thou hearest, Lewis, love?" And he, impatiently: "Nee, nee, I hear." Flutter-Duck, thus recalled from the pleasures of maternity to its duties, would recommence the prayer. "_Médiâni!_" Which little Rachel would silently ignore. "_Médiâni!_" Flutter-Duck's tone would now be imperative and ill-tempered. Then little Rachel would turn to her father querulously. "She thayth it again, _Médiâni_, father!" And Flutter-Duck, outraged by this childish insolence, would exclaim, "Thou hearest, Lewis, love?" and incontinently fall to clouting the child. And the father, annoyed by the shrill ululation consequent upon the clouting: "Nee, nee, I hear too much." Rachel's refusal to be coerced into giving devotional over-measure was not merely due to her sense of equity. Her appetite counted for more. Prayers were the avenue to breakfast, and to pamper her featherheaded mother in repetitions was to put back the meal. Flutter-Duck was quite capable of breaking down, even in the middle, if her attention was distracted for a moment, and of trying back from the very beginning. She would, for example, get as far as "Hear--my daughter--the instruction--of thy mother," giving out the words one by one in the sacred language which was to her abracadabra. And little Rachel, equally in the dark, would repeat obediently, "Hear--my daughter--the instruction of--thy mother." Then the kettle would boil, or Flutter-Duck would overhear a remark made by one of the "hands," and interject: "Yes, I'd _give_ him!" or, "A fat lot _she_ knows about it," or some phrase of that sort; after which she would grope for the lost thread of prayer, and end by ejaculating desperately:-- "_Médiâni!_" And the child sternly setting her face against this flippancy, there would be slapping and screaming, and if the father protested, Flutter-Duck would toss her head, and rejoin in her most dignified English: "If I bin a mother, I bin a mother!"