Her Friend Littlejohn

soul of her which peered and laughed out of
her blue eyes that took him captive.

Like most healthy children, W. V. did
not understand what sorrow, sickness, or
death meant. Indeed it is told of her that
she once exclaimed gleefully, “Oh, see,
here’s a funeral! Which is the bride?”
The absence of her mother did not weigh
upon her. Once she awoke at night and
cried for her; and on one or two occasions,
in a sentimental mood, she sighed “ I should
like to see my father! Don’t you think we
could ‘run over’?”” The immediate pres-
ent, its fun and nonsense and grave respon-
sibilities, absorbed all her energies and
‘attention ; and what a divine dispensation it
is that we who never forget can be forgotten
so easily.

I fancy, from what I have heard, that she
must have regarded Littlejohn’s ignorance
of the ways of children as one of her respon-
sibilities. It was really very deplorable to
find a great-statured, ruddy-bearded fellow
of two-and-thirty so absolutely wanting in
tact, so incapable of “ pretending,”’ so desti-
tute of the capacity of rhyming or of telling

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