At this period of John’s career, his father was alive--and he was fond of his father. Sometimes papa would be very late, and would go up to John’s little bed, and bring him down in his night-gown only half awake, seeing the candles like stars through a mist of sleep and wonder, till he was roused to the fullest wakefulness by cakes and sweetmeats, and every kind of dainty which papa had brought. John became quite used to all the varying experiences of this mid-night incident--the reluctance to be roused up, the glory of going downstairs, the delight of the feast. He sat on his father’s knee, with his little bare feet wrapped in a shawl, and his eyes shining as brightly as the candles, munching and chattering. He got quite used to it. He used to feel uncomfortable sometimes in the morning, and heard it said that something was very bad for him, and that the child’s stomach, as well as his morals, would be spoiled. Johnnie knew as little about his stomach as about his morals. And he had a way of being well which greatly interfered with all these prognostications. He was a very sturdy little boy. He had a consciousness through all these scenes of his mother’s face, very pale, without any smile in it, showing serious, like the moon, among those lights. She gave him no cake or oranges, but it was she who wrapped up his feet in the shawl, and took care of him in the morning when his little head sometimes ached. Papa was never visible in the morning. Johnnie was sometimes a little afraid of him, though he was so jolly in these mid-night visits. The boy was frightened when he was being carried downstairs, and clung very close, though he did not say anything about his fears. Papa would lurch sometimes on those occasions, like the steamboat on which John once had gone to sea. The memory of the lighted table, the father who always made a noise, laughing, talking, sometimes singing, always so fond of his little boy; but mamma dreadfully quiet, scarcely saying anything, and the lights of the candles, not at all like the candles we have now-a-days, but big, and shining like stars, never faded from his memory, even when he had grown a man.