"Now to the kitchen!" Napoleon exclaimed, at last. "M. Piron will be so pleased. Aha, Piron, here is Mees Betsee; you know how she loves creams. Send her some and some bonbons. See, _regardez, mademoiselle, voilà un mouton pour mon diner, dont on fait une lanterne_," pointing to the lean carcass of a sheep hanging up in the kitchen, in which the French servants had placed a candle which shone through. "But I know," he continued, "you are dying to see the baby;" and the sisters went with him to Madame Montholon's apartment to see her six-weeks-old girl.
Napoleon took his little god-daughter in his arms.
"Oh, you will let it fall!" cried Betsy as he dandled it clumsily.
"No, no! See, it will let me do anything with it;" and he pinched little Lili's nose and chin until she cried.
"You do not know how to hold a baby," protested Betsy.
"But I ought to know," responded Napoleon with a twinkle of amusement in his eye. "Often and often I have nursed the King of Rome when he was younger than Lili."
After leaving the baby and Madame Montholon, the little girls went with Napoleon to the garden outside.
"It is not like The Briars," the Emperor said, shaking his head sadly.
"I should say not;" and Betsy looked from the bare surroundings of the house to the rugged mountain near by with its scraggly vegetation of wild samphire, prickly pears and aloes, its iron-covered rocks, with sharp cliffs and mysterious caves overshadowing the house.
Napoleon's momentary sadness may have come from his casual allusion to his son, the little King of Rome, the child whom he was never to see again. Those who observed him when any allusion was made to his child were always sure that Napoleon's heart held great fatherly affection. Once when he had been a trifle downcast, Dr. O'Meara told him an anecdote he had heard about the child. Immediately Napoleon smiled with great animation and his face brightened. At other times when the conversation turned on the child, he grew perceptibly sadder.
His love for his own child made Napoleon undoubtedly more interested in all children, and he was never ashamed, as some men are, to show this interest in the children of his friends.
This first visit to Longwood was in every way delightful to the sisters, not only because there was much to see that was new to them in the arrangement of the house and grounds, but because they found the Emperor in one of his most boyish moods.