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It was the sound he had already heard outside the building. "We are the children of the whispering night, Who live eternally in dreadful fright Of stories told us in the grey twilight By nurserymaids! We are the children of a winter's day; Under our breath we chant this mournful lay; We dance with phantoms and with shadows play, And have no rest.

"I am particularly anxious to know whether there is a field open to independent female labour." "All the superior young women seemed to turn nurserymaids," said the Colonel. "Oh," interposed Fanny, "do you remember that nice girl of ours who would marry that Orderly-Sergeant O'Donoghoe? I have had a letter from her in such distress."

Her servants were known and sought after for miles round. Almost all the girls who attained a certain place in the village school were taken by her, one or two at a time, as housemaids, laundrymaids, nurserymaids, or kitchenmaids, and after a year or two's training were started in life amongst the neighbouring families, with good principles and wardrobes.

There young Toots was, at any rate; possessed of the gruffest of voices and the shrillest of minds; sticking ornamental pins into his shirt, and keeping a ring in his waistcoat pocket to put on his little finger by stealth, when the pupils went out walking; constantly falling in love by sight with nurserymaids, who had no idea of his existence; and looking at the gas-lighted world over the little iron bars in the left-hand corner window of the front three pairs of stairs, after bed-time, like a greatly overgrown cherub who had sat up aloft much too long.

Then she called up all the careless nurserymaids, and stuck pins into them all over, and wheeled them about in perambulators with tight straps across their stomachs and their heads and arms hanging over the side, till they were quite sick and stupid, and would have had sun-strokes: but, being under the water, they could only have water-strokes; which, I assure you, are nearly as bad, as you will find if you try to sit under a mill-wheel.

Every one seems to have forgotten the existence of the Prussians. The Cafés are crowded by a gay crowd. On the Boulevard, Monsieur and Madame walk quietly along with their children. In the Champs Elysées honest mechanics and bourgeois are basking in the sun, and nurserymaids are flirting with soldiers. There is even a lull in the universal drilling.

To weave that donkey and that Bath 'cheer' through the narrow streets of the various Belverns without putting to death any babies, and without engendering the outspoken condemnation of the screaming mothers and nurserymaids, is a task for a Jehu.

Besides the fear of spoiling their clothes makes them afraid of household- work; so that in a little time we shall have none but chambermaids and nurserymaids; and of this let me give one instance; my family is composed of myself and sister, a man and a maid; and, being without the last, a young wench came to hire herself.

The gardener, the stock-tenders, the dairy-maids, nurserymaids, hog-minders, and stable-keepers were all in their places, and we began to forget our recent troubles in the apparent prospect of success. One difficulty of the new system presented itself. Several of the negroes began to feign sickness, and cheat the overseer whenever it could be done with impunity.

Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray gateway, with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream color and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooden gables warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canons' children are walking with their nurserymaids.