Even when he was only five years old, one sees that half whimsical wrinkling over his soft brown eyes that characterised his face.
He was from the first, the Vicar always declared, a terrible nuisance about the village.

He seems to have had a proportionate impulse to play, much curiosity and sociability, and in addition there was a certain craving within him--I grieve to say--for more to eat.

In spite of what Mrs.Greenfield called an "_excessively_ generous" allowance of food from Lady Wondershoot, he displayed what the doctor perceived at once was the "Criminal Appetite." It carries out only too completely Lady Wondershoot's worst experiences of the lower classes--that in spite of an allowance of nourishment inordinately beyond what is known to be the maximum necessity even of an adult human being, the creature was found to steal.

And what he stole he ate with an inelegant voracity.

His great hand would come over garden walls; he would covet the very bread in the bakers' carts.