We drove up the long avenue of tall, stately pines, and found her
sitting with her husband and their little hostage to fortune enjoying
the glorious mellow sunshine. The tiny monarch sat in his wagon
playing with a handful of autumn leaves which his father, with proud
paternal indifference to the immaculate surface of the silken carriage
blanket, had bestowed upon him. I now became the rival--the successful
rival--of the rustling autumn leaves. At my instigation his mother
freed him from his equipage and a little anxiously yet resolutely laid
him in my arms. I dandled him, I chirruped to him, I hummed to him, I
encouraged him to gnaw my watch and to claw my mustache, and presently
I began to toss him up in my hands and let him down again.
"Be careful, Fred," said Josephine, warningly; and I saw a shadow of
solicitude cross my daughter's face, though she was plainly doing her
best to seem unconcerned.
"Pooh," I answered. "I tossed up all my own babies in this way year in
and year out, and not one of them ever got a scratch. I'm not going to
begin by letting my precious grandson fall. Am I, little lamb?"
Thereupon, by way of showing what an adept I was in the art of baby
tossing, I shot him upward with self-confident impetus. To be sure, my
hands never really left him; they followed him as he ascended and as he
came down.
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