sentence--just exactly as it made "us" sneeze now! After the tap came a kind of little pattering and scratching, like baby taps, not quite sure of their own existence; then, had Grandpapa's and Grandmamma's ears been a very little sharper, they could not but have heard a small duel in words. "_You_, bruvver, my fingers' bones is tired." "I _told_ you, sister," reproachfully, "us should always bring old Neddy's nose downstairs with us. They never hear _us_ tapping." Then a faint sigh or two and a redoubled assault, crowned with success. Grandmamma, whom after all I am not sure but that I have maligned in calling her deaf--the taps were so very faint really!--Grandmamma looks up from her netting, and in a thin but clear voice calls out, "Come in!" The door opens--then, after admitting the entrance of two small figures, is carefully closed again, and the two small figures, with a military salute from the boy, a bob, conscientiously intended for a curtsey, from the girl, advance a step or two into the room. "Grandmamma," say the two high-pitched baby voices, speaking so exactly together that they sound but as one. "Grandmamma, it's '_us_.'" Still no response. Grandmamma is not indifferent--far from it--but just at this moment her netting is at a critical stage impossible to disregard; she _thinks_ to herself "wait a moment, my dears," and is quite under the impression that she has said it aloud; this is a mistake, but all the same "my dears" do wait a moment--several moments indeed, hand-in-hand, uncomplainingly, without indeed the very faintest notion in their faithful little hearts that there is anything to complain of--there are _some_ lessons to be learnt from children long ago, I think,--while Grandmamma tries to secure her knots. Look at them while they stand there; it is always a good plan to save time, and we have a minute or two to spare. They are so alike in size and colour and feature that if it had not been that one was a boy and the other a girl, there would have been no telling them apart. Before Duke was put into the first stage of boy-attire--what that exactly was in those days I confess I am not sure--they never _had_ been told apart was the fact of the matter, till one day the brilliant idea struck Grandmamma of decorating little Pamela with a coral necklace. She little knew what she was about; both babies burst into howling distress, and were not to be quieted even when the unlucky beads were taken away; no, indeed, they only cried the more. Grandmamma and Nurse were at their wits' end, and Grandpapa's superior intelligence had at last to be appealed to. And not in vain.