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CHAPTER I. SOME BABIES. IE the sash a very little looser, nurse, and give the loops a more graceful fall; there-so. Now he's a beauty! every inch of him." And Mrs. Hastings moved backward a few steps in order to get the full effect. A beauty he was, certainly; others beside his mother would have admitted that. What baby fresh from a bath, and robed in the daintiest and most perfect of baby toilets, with tightly curling rings of brown hair covering the handsome head; with great sparkling, dancing blue eyes, and laughing rosebud mouth; with hands and feet and body strung on invisible wires, and quivering with life and glee, was ever other than a beauty? The whole house was in commotion in honor of the fact that Master Pliny L. Hastings, only son and heir of the great Pliny Hastings, Senior, of Hastings' Hall, had "laughed and cried, and nodded and winked," through the entire space of three hundred and sixty-five days and nights, and actually reached the first anniversary of his birthday. A remarkable boy was Pliny Hastings. He didn't know yet that his father was a millionaire, but he must have surmised it, for, as far back as he could remember, his bits of sleeves had been looped with real pearls; rosewood and lace and silk and down had united to make his tiny bed; he had bitten his first tooth through on a sphere of solid gold-and all the wonderful and improbable contrivances for royal babyhood that could be bought or imagined, met together in that grand house on the Avenue for this treasured bit of humanity. On this particular day baby was out in all his glory; he had made the circuit of the great parlors, stopping on his way to be tossed toward the ceiling, in the arms of first one uncle and then another. He had been kissed and cuddled by all the aunties and cousins, until his cheeks were rosy with triumph; and, finally, he had been carried, shouting with glee, high up on his father's shoulder, down to the dining-room, and occupied the seat of honor at the long tab