Susy drew an envious little sigh and said: "I wish _I_ could have crooked teeth and spectacles!" Once, when Susy was six months along in her eighth year, she did something one day in the presence of company, which subjected her to criticism and reproof.

Afterward, when she was alone with her mother, as was her custom she reflected a little while over the matter.

Then she set up what I think--and what the shade of Burns would think--was a quite good philosophical defence.
"Well, mamma, you know I didn't see myself, and so I couldn't know how it looked." In homes where the near friends and visitors are mainly literary people--lawyers, judges, professors and clergymen--the children's ears become early familiarized with wide vocabularies.

It is natural for them to pick up any words that fall in their way; it is natural for them to pick up big and little ones indiscriminately; it is natural for them to use without fear any word that comes to their net, no matter how formidable it may be as to size.

As a result, their talk is a curious and funny musketry clatter of little words, interrupted at intervals by the heavy artillery crash of a word of such imposing sound and size that it seems to shake the ground and rattle the windows.