THE WARMINT

Oh, she was just a little thing/ A slim thing, a narrow thing,/ A pig-tailed, dark and blackeyed thing,/ Not five span."" De la Mare's rhyme about all the naughtiness this privileged ""imp of mischief"" gets into is the more attractive for its ending, detailing without a hint of a moral how Mamma, Cook, the gardener, and her nurse all love and indulge ""this wicked little warmint."" Ness's Victorian setting points up the propriety that makes the warmint's antics notable, and it's all nicely got up, in black line against blocks of pale aqua, in a suitably tiny (6fl x 4fl) package. But keep in mind that, with 33 short lines of text, it's ""just a little thing"" in every sense.