He
cooked unparalleled dishes for us, and read poetry aloud to me with an
exquisite justness and delicacy of taste that I have never heard
surpassed.
His praise was nectar to me. When he said, "I tell you what, Regie,
you've an uncommon lot of general information, I can tell you," my
head was quite turned. Whatever he did seemed right to me. When I
first came to school, my hat was duly peppered and pickled by the boys
and replaced by me with one of unexceptionable shape. My shirts then
gave offence to my new master.
"I suppose," he said, surveying me deliberately, "a good many of your
things are made by Mrs. Baggage?"
"Nurse Bundle makes my shirts, Damer," said I.
"It's all the same," said Damer. "I knew it was connected with a
_parcel_ somehow. Well, the _Package_ patterns are very pretty, no
doubt, but I think it's time you were properly rigged out."
Which was duly done; and when holidays came and the scandalized Mrs.
Bundle asked what I had done "with them bran-new fine linen shirts,"
and where "them rubbishing cotton rags" had come from that I brought
in their place, I could only inform her, with a feeble imitation of
Leo's lofty coolness, that I had used the first to clean Damer's
lamp, and that the second were the "correct thing.
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