CHAPTER XVIII.
As sweetly in a beggar as a king."
Do what I will, I cannot get used to the fact that I may run up and downstairs, sing, laugh, talk at the top of my voice, not only in the school-room, but in the passages and in the drawing-room; sit nose and knees into the fire if I please, instead of looking at it from afar off with blue cheeks and pinched nose; give my opinion with a pleasant conviction that it will be treated with consideration; in short, conduct myself generally as a human being and independent member of society, whereas, until now, I have been but a miserable and insignificant atom gravitating around that tremendous magnet, the governor.
I don't suppose that he would be considered a very great man out of his family. Folks might call him a handsome little man, or a cross little man; and if he tried on his pranks in society, no doubt society would show him the door. (Happy thought! perhaps that is why he has eschewed it; and unhappy we, who are made to act as buffers between him and the outer world.) But to us he is Queen Victoria and the Emperor of all the Russias, and anything else that can be suggested as important, awe-inspiring, and not to be set at nought.
It is all very different now. The house echoes from morning to night with gay young voices, doors bang, not compelled thereto by a wrathful hand, but naturally; dogs bark, the parrot struts about at its leisure, conversation goes on briskly and evenly "upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's chamber;" our meals are no longer served up and eaten by steam.
Simpkins has made a long farewell to all his greatness in impromptu slides and races against time, subsiding into a dignified
