No, Miss Gladys, I'm not a-going any faster; I wouldn't run, if it was ever so.
When the contrac' was signed of my wages, it was never wrote down that I had to run at any time." And having now reached the fruit-house, he was just pulling out his big key, when something almost like shame showed itself in his ruddy face, as a decided and somewhat mocking voice addressed him.
"Well, Nicholas, I'm just amazed at ye! I've lived upward of sixty years in this island, Scotland and England both, and never did I see a man got over so by children in my life! Talking of my niece's children, are ye--Mrs.Daniel Mortimer's?
I wonder at ye--they were just nothing to these." Here Mr.Swan, having unlocked the door, dived into the fruit-house, and occupied himself for some moments in recovering his self-possession and making his selection; then emerging with an armful of pears, he shouted after Miss Christie Grant, who had got a good way down the walk by this time.
"I don't deny, ma'am, that these air aggravating now and then, but anyhow they haven't painted my palings pink and my door pea-green." Miss Christie returned.

She seldom took the part of any children, excepting for the sake of argument or for family reasons; and she felt at that moment that the Daniel Mortimers were related to her, and that these, though they called her "aunt," were not.
"Ye should remember," she observed, with severity, "that ye had already left your house when they painted it." "Remember it!" exclaimed the gardener, straightening himself; "ay, ay, I remember it--coming along the lane that my garden sloped down to, so that every inch of it could be seen.

It had been all raked over, and there, just out of the ground, growing up in mustard-and-cress letters as long as my arm, I saw '_This genteel residence to let, lately occupied by N.Swan, Esq._' I took my hob-nailed boots to them last words, and I promise you I made the mustard-and-cress fly." "Well, ye see," observed Miss Christie, who was perfectly serious, "there is great truth in your saying that those children did too much as they pleased; but ye must consider that Mr.Mortimer didn't like to touch any of them, because they were not his own." "That's just it, ma'am, and Mrs.Mortimer didn't like to touch any of them because they _were her own;_ so between the two they got to be, I don't say as bad as these, but--" Here he shook his head, and leaning his back to the fruit-house door, began diligently to peel the fruit for an assembly, silent, because eating.

"As for Master Giles," he went on, more to torment the old lady than to disparage the gentleman in question, "before ever he went to school, he chalked a picture that he called my arms on the tool house-door, three turnips as natural as life, and a mad kind of bird flourishing its wings about, that he said was a swan displayed.

Underneath, for a _morter_, was wrote, 'All our geese air swans.' Now what do you call that for ten years old ?" "Well, well," said Aunt Christie, "that's nearly twenty years ago." Then the fruit being all finished, N.Swan, Esq., shut up his clasp-knife, and the story being also finished, his audience ran away, excepting Miss Christie, to whom he said-- "But I was fond of those children, you'll understand, though they were powerful plagues." "Swan," said the old lady, "ye'll never be respectit by children.