“Ah! That it does! If you’d only borrow my stick and tap this piece of pavement⁠—this dirty stone that my foot taps⁠—it would start up a coach and six. I say! Let’s believe so!”

“With all my heart,” replied the good old man.

“And I’ll tell you what I must ask you to do, godmother. I must ask you to be so kind as give my child a tap, and change him altogether. O my child has been such a bad, bad child of late! It worries me nearly out of my wits. Not done a stroke of work these ten days. Has had the horrors, too, and fancied that four copper-coloured men in red wanted to throw him into a fiery furnace.”

“But that’s dangerous, Jenny.”