And for half an
hour, he had submitted good-temperedly to being handed about and
tickled and half-smothered with kisses. He had eyen permitted Nell to
bite his little pink toes severally, and say a surprising amount of
nonsense about little pigs that went to market and did similarly
absurd things.
He had hardly remonstrated when there had been a dispute about the
possession of his person, and Bunty had clung to his head and body
while Nell pulled vigorously at his legs.
But after a time, when Esther made him a little bed on one of the
seats and tried to lay him down upon it, a sense of his grievances
came over him.
He had a swinging cot at home; with little gold bars at the foot to
blink at--he could not see why he should be mulcted of it, and made to
put up with a rug three times doubled. He was accustomed, too, to a
shaded light, a quiet room, and a warning H'sh! h'sh! whenever
people forgot themselves sufficiently to make the slightest noise.
Here the great yellow light flared all the time, and every one of the
noisy creatures at whose hands he endured so much was within a few
feet of him.
So he lifted up his voice and wept. And when he found weeping did not
produce his gold-barred cot, and the little dangling tassels on the
mosquito nets, he raised his voice two notes, and when even there
Esther only went on patting his shoulder in a soothing way he burst
into roars absolutely deafening.
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