CHAPTER II.

Tuapeka Times, Volume V, Issue 224, 16 May 1872, Page 9

CHAPTER 11.

I fell in love very early in life, as was customary in our family. There are early-marrying families, as there are early peas and potatoes, and so on.

I had six brothers and five sisters, and we were all engaged before the age of twenty : some of us several times. It was our habit to get engaged at brief intervals, and the affair was generally broken off by the parental authorities on the other side, who didn't seem to think an alliance with our family would have been particularly advantageous. It wasn't the fault of any member of our faruily he or she wasn't married ever so many months earlier than he or she was.

My mamma had a pretty taste for sentiment, and read lots of novels from the circulating library. My papa had iv particular- time for sentiment, but went instead into the city, and did all he could on a high stool at high pressure to clothe and feed the rest of us that were left at home. I rather think he found it difficult to do.

We were a good, healthy young family — the twelve of us ; fine-growing boys and bouncing girls, with all the digestions of young ostriches, which nothing troubled. When I come to think of it, I remember my poor papa spent much thought and time upon the discovery of new food, combining nutri-* tive and filling properties, but we puzzled him dreadfully. ■ f recollect him, as though it were yesterday ; a wiry, hatchet-faced little man, with a h mdful of hair scattered loosely over his head, which gave him

always a half frightened look. I think I see him now, presiding at the head of table, when we took our Sunday dinner all to-gether, and how he said one day, with a kind of grim jocularity — " It's a sin and a shame, Evelina, to let those young people loose upon the joint without a trifling barricade of rice pudding to take of the violence of the first attack.'

I think it struck us all at the same time that day that we- 1 ought to feel a little ashamed of ourselves, and I, for one, only went in for two helps. I hadnt the heart to ask a third.