If a child pulls your tail or ties a paper bag round your head, you can give it one for itself and nobody blames you.

"Well, serve you right," they say to the yelling brat, "you shouldn't tease the poor thing." But if you resent a baby's holding you by the throat and trying to gouge out your eye with a wooden ladle, you are called a spiteful beast, and "shoo'd" all round the garden.

If people keep babies, they don't keep me; that's my rule.
"'After sampling some three or four families, I finally fixed upon a banker.

Offers more advantageous from a worldly point of view were open to me.

I could have gone to a public-house, where the victuals were simply unlimited, and where the back door was left open all night.