Ethel Turner

“ Poor Uncle Spruson! He had a grimy little nephew at his heels, and he was helping the cabman to carry a great black saucepan in which the dirtiest little girl in the world was sitting, weeping noisily.
The riders exhausted every interjection in their vocabularies, then they dismounted and made a circle round the unhappy trio.
There were clever men there, clever women—men learned in abstruse sciences, women of brilliant inventive powers—and yet not one of them knew a single trustworthy recipe for extracting small girls from saucepans. ”

“ Babs had dragged it down from its low shelf on to the ground.
"You're much too fat and big," Greg said; "and whath the good tying you up, Babth? you've come undone."
"Puddings do sometimes," said Babs, "an' I b'leeve I am little enough to get in. You can put the cloth on after, Gweg."
It was utterly marvellous how she did it, how she compressed those plump little arms and legs of her into such small space; but after a certain amount of bumping and laughing, and hard breathing and oh-ing, there was the pudding in the pot, just as surely and securely as Martha's had been in the morning. ”

“ But the first ironmonger was out for the day, and at the second Uncle Spruson rang the bell till he was nearly blue in the face without receiving a reply.
"Try the blackthmith," said Greg.
Poor little Babs! her endurance utterly flown as the cramp and pains increased, was crying at the very top of her voice, and Greg was weeping in the same key out of sheer sympathy.
Poor Uncle Spruson! He was a bachelor of fastidious ways; conventionality was the god he worshipped, and Society at once his pleasure and his dearest pain. And lo! ”