Frazer, by the nurse's permission, pacing up and down a sunny walk in the kitchen garden, with steps slow and grotesquely dignified, holding the infant warily and tenderly, affirming, when he gave her back to the nurse, in a self-congratulatory tone, that "little miss" would be quiet with him when she would be so with no one else; which certainly might be cause for some wonder, seeing that he would usually accompany his nursings with such extraordinarily guttural attempts at singing as were far better calculated to scare any ordinary baby into temporary convulsions than to soothe it to rest when its slumbers had once been broken.
