Produced by Mike Lough





THE GOLDEN AGE

By Kenneth Grahame


     “'T IS OPPORTUNE TO LOOK BACK UPON OLD TIMES, AND
     CONTEMPLATE OUR FOREFATHERS.  GREAT EXAMPLES GROW
     THIN, AND TO BE FETCHED FROM THE PASSED WORLD.
     SIMPLICITY FLIES AWAY, AND INIQUITY COMES AT LONG
     STRIDES UPON US.”

     SIR THOMAS BROWNE



Contents:

     PROLOGUE--THE OLYMPIANS
     A HOLIDAY
     A WHITE-WASHED UNCLE
     ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS
     THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS
     SAWDUST AND SIN
     “YOUNG ADAM CUPID”
      THE BURGLARS
     A HARVESTING
     SNOWBOUND
     WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT
     THE ARGONAUTS
     THE ROMAN ROAD
     THE SECRET DRAWER
     “EXIT TYRANNUS”
      THE BLUE ROOM
     A FALLING OUT
     “LUSISTI SATIS”




PROLOGUE: THE OLYMPIANS

Looking back to those days of old, ere the gate shut behind me, I can
see now that to children with a proper equipment of parents these things
would have worn a different aspect. But to those whose nearest were
aunts and uncles, a special attitude of mind may be allowed. They
treated us, indeed, with kindness enough as to the needs of the flesh,
but after that with indifference (an indifference, as I recognise, the
result of a certain stupidity), and therewith the commonplace conviction
that your child is merely animal. At a very early age I remember
realising in a quite impersonal and kindly way the existence of that
stupidity, and its tremendous influence in the world; while there grew
up in me, as in the parallel case of Caliban upon Setebos, a vague sense
of a ruling power, wilful and freakish, and prone to the practice of
vagaries--“just choosing so:” as, for instance, the giving of authority
over us to these hopeless and incapable creatures, when it might far
more reasonably have been given to ourselves over them. These elders,
our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect, but only a
certain blend of envy--of their good luck--and pity--for their inability
to make use of it. Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless features in
their character (when we troubled ourselves to waste a thought on them:
which wasn't often) that, having absolute licence to indulge in the
pleasures of life, they could get no good of it. They might dabble
in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in the most
uncompromising Sunday clothes; they were free to issue forth and buy
gunpowder in the full eye of the sun--free to fire cannons and explode
mines on the lawn: yet they never did any one of these things. No
irresistible Energy haled them to church o' Sundays; yet they went there
regularly of their own accord, though they betrayed no greater delight
in the experience than ourselves.

On the whole, the existence of these Olympians seemed to be entirely
void of interests, even as their movements were confined and slow, and
their habits stereotyped and senseless. To anything but appearances
they were blind. For them the orchard (a place elf-haunted, wonderful!)
simply produced so many apples and cherries: or it didn't, when the
failures of Nature were not infrequently ascribed to us. They never
set foot within fir-wood or hazel-copse, nor dreamt of the marvels hid
therein. The mysterious sources--sources as of old Nile--that fed the
duck-pond had no magic for them. They were unaware of Indians, nor
recked they anything of bisons or of pirates (with pistols!), though the
whole place swarmed with such portents. They cared not about exploring
for robbers' caves, nor digging for hidden treasure. Perhaps, indeed,
it was one of their best qualities that they spent the greater part of
their time stuffily indoors.

To be sure, there was an exception in the curate, who would receive
unblenching the information that the meadow beyond the orchard was
a prairie studded with herds of buffalo, which it was our delight,
moccasined and tomahawked, to ride down with those whoops that announce
the scenting of blood. He neither laughed nor sneered, as the Olympians
would have done; but possessed of a serious idiosyncrasy, he would
contribute such lots of valuable suggestion as to the pursuit of this
particular sort of big game that, as it seemed to us, his mature age
and eminent position could scarce have been attained without a practical
knowledge of the creature in its native lair. Then, too, he was always
ready to constitute himself a hostile army or a band of marauding
Indians on the shortest possible notice: in brief, a distinctly able
man, with talents, so far as we could judge, immensely above the
majority. I trust he is a bishop by this time,--he had all the necessary
qualifications, as we knew.

These strange folk had visitors sometimes,--stiff and colourless
Olympians like themselves, equally without vital interests and
intelligent pursuits: emerging out of the clouds, and passing away again
to drag on an aimless existence somewhere out of our ken. Then brute
force was pitilessly applied. We were captured, washed, and forced into
clean collars: silently submitting, as was our wont, with more
contempt than anger. Anon, with unctuous hair and faces stiffened in
a conventional grin, we sat and listened to the usual platitudes. How
could reasonable people spend their precious time so? That was ever our
wonder as we bounded forth at last--to the old clay-pit to make pots, or
to hunt bears among the hazels.

It was incessant matter for amazement how these Olympians would talk
over our heads--during meals, for instance--of this or the other social
or political inanity, under the delusion that these pale phantasms
of reality were among the importances of life. We illuminati, eating
silently, our heads full of plans and conspiracies, could have told them
what real life was. We had just left it outside, and were all on fire
to get back to it. Of course we didn't waste the revelation on them;
the futility of imparting our ideas had long been demonstrated. One in
thought and purpose, linked by the necessity of combating one hostile
fate, a power antagonistic ever,--a power we lived to evade,--we had
no confidants save ourselves. This strange anaemic order of beings was
further removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared
our natural existence in the sun. The estrangement was fortified by an
abiding sense of injustice, arising from the refusal of the Olympians
ever to defend, retract, or admit themselves in the wrong, or to accept
similar concessions on our part. For instance, when I flung the cat out
of an upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and it didn't
hurt the cat), I was ready, after a moment's reflection, to own I was
wrong, as a gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to end there?
I trow not. Again, when Harold was locked up in his room all day, for
assault and battery upon a neighbour's pig,--an action he would have
scorned, being indeed on the friendliest terms with the porker in
question,--there was no handsome expression of regret on the discovery
of the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the
imprisonment,--indeed he had very soon escaped by the window, with
assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his
release,--as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of
course that word was never spoken.

Well! The Olympians are all past and gone. Somehow the sun does not seem
to shine so brightly as it used; the trackless meadows of old time have
shrunk and dwindled away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt, a dull
suspicion, creeps over me. Et in Arcadia ego,--I certainly did once
inhabit Arcady. Can it be I too have become an Olympian?




A HOLIDAY.

The masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of
the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves
sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept heaven
seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp.

It was one of the first awakenings of the year. The earth stretched
herself, smiling in her sleep; and everything leapt and pulsed to
the stir of the giant's movement. With us it was a whole holiday;
the occasion a birthday--it matters not whose. Some one of us had had
presents, and pretty conventional speeches, and had glowed with that
sense of heroism which is no less sweet that nothing has been done to
deserve it. But the holiday was for all, the rapture of awakening Nature
for all, the various outdoor joys of puddles and sun and hedge-breaking
for all. Colt-like I ran through the meadows, frisking happy heels in
the face of Nature laughing responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the
blue; wide pools left by the winter's floods flashed the colour back,
true and brilliant; and the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch
that seemed to kindle something in my own small person as well as in the
rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the brimming
sun-bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline and
correction, for one day at least. My legs ran of themselves, and though
I heard my name called faint and shrill behind, there was no stopping
for me. It was only Harold, I concluded, and his legs, though shorter
than mine, were good for a longer spurt than this. Then I heard it
called again, but this time more faintly, with a pathetic break in the
middle; and I pulled up short, recognising Charlotte's plaintive note.

She panted up anon, and dropped on the turf beside me. Neither had any
desire for talk; the glow and the glory of existing on this perfect
morning were satisfaction full and sufficient.

“Where's Harold;” I asked presently.

“Oh, he's just playin' muffin-man, as usual,” said Charlotte with
petulance. “Fancy wanting to be a muffin-man on a whole holiday!”

It was a strange craze, certainly; but Harold, who invented his own
games and played them without assistance, always stuck staunchly to
a new fad, till he had worn it quite out. Just at present he was a
muffin-man, and day and night he went through passages and up and down
staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to
invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet--to pass
along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an imaginary
bell and offering airy muffins of your own make to a bustling thronging
crowd of your own creation--there were points about the game, it
cannot be denied, though it seemed scarce in harmony with this radiant
wind-swept morning!

“And Edward, where is he?” I questioned again.

“He's coming along by the road,” said Charlotte. “He'll be crouching
in the ditch when we get there, and he's going to be a grizzly bear and
spring out on us, only you mustn't say I told you, 'cos it's to be a
surprise.”

“All right,” I said magnanimously. “Come on and let's be surprised.” But
I could not help feeling that on this day of days even a grizzly felt
misplaced and common.

Sure enough an undeniable bear sprang out on us as we dropped into the
road; then ensued shrieks, growlings, revolver-shots, and unrecorded
heroisms, till Edward condescended at last to roll over and die, bulking
large and grim, an unmitigated grizzly. It was an understood thing, that
whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die, sooner or
later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have been all
strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns have displaced our hard-won
civilisation. This little affair concluded with satisfaction to all
parties concerned, we rambled along the road, picking up the defaulting
Harold by the way, muffinless now and in his right and social mind.

“What would you do?” asked Charlotte presently,--the book of the
moment always dominating her thoughts until it was sucked dry and cast
aside,--“what would you do if you saw two lions in the road, one on each
side, and you didn't know if they was loose or if they was chained up?”

“Do?” shouted Edward, valiantly, “I should--I should--I should--”

His boastful accents died away into a mumble: “Dunno what I should do.”

“Shouldn't do anything,” I observed after consideration; and really it
would be difficult to arrive at a wiser conclusion.

“If it came to DOING,” remarked Harold, reflectively, “the lions would
do all the doing there was to do, wouldn't they?”

“But if they was GOOD lions,” rejoined Charlotte, “they would do as they
would be done by.”

“Ah, but how are you to know a good lion from a bad one?” said Edward.
“The books don't tell you at all, and the lions ain't marked any
different.”

“Why, there aren't any good lions,” said Harold, hastily.

“Oh yes, there are, heaps and heaps,” contradicted Edward. “Nearly all
the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles' lion,
and St. Jerome's lion, and--and--the Lion and the Unicorn--”

“He beat the Unicorn,” observed Harold, dubiously, “all round the town.”

“That PROVES he was a good lion,” cried Edwards triumphantly. “But the
question is, how are you to tell 'em when you see 'em?”

“_I_ should ask Martha,” said Harold of the simple creed.

Edward snorted contemptuously, then turned to Charlotte. “Look here,” he
said; “let's play at lions, anyhow, and I'll run on to that corner and
be a lion,--I'll be two lions, one on each side of the road,--and
you'll come along, and you won't know whether I'm chained up or not, and
that'll be the fun!”

“No, thank you,” said Charlotte, firmly; “you'll be chained up till
I'm quite close to you, and then you'll be loose, and you'll tear me in
pieces, and make my frock all dirty, and p'raps you'll hurt me as well.
_I_ know your lions!”

“No, I won't; I swear I won't,” protested Edward. “I'll be quite a new
lion this time,--something you can't even imagine.” And he raced off to
his post. Charlotte hesitated; then she went timidly on, at each step
growing less Charlotte, the mummer of a minute, and more the anxious
Pilgrim of all time. The lion's wrath waxed terrible at her approach;
his roaring filled the startled air. I waited until they were both
thoroughly absorbed, and then I slipped through the hedge out of the
trodden highway, into the vacant meadow spaces. It was not that I was
unsociable, nor that I knew Edward's lions to the point of satiety; but
the passion and the call of the divine morning were high in my blood.

Earth to earth! That was the frank note, the joyous summons of the day;
and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human discussions
and pretences, when boon Nature, reticent no more, was singing that
full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control of every
fibre. The air was wine; the moist earth-smell, wine; the lark's song,
the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of
a distant train,--all were wine,--or song, was it? or odour, this
unity they all blended into? I had no words then to describe it, that
earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I
found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the
squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick;
I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself
singing. The words were mere nonsense,--irresponsible babble; the tune
was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and
yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the
one thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected it
with scorn, Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised and
accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

All the time the hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where
he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. “Take me for guide to-day,” he
seemed to plead. “Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of the
stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary foot
homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day
why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I, who whip round corners and
bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the
best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one, the
lord of misrule, and I alone am irresponsible and unprincipled, and obey
no law.” And for me, I was ready enough to fall in with the fellow's
humour; was not this a whole holiday? So we sheered off together,
arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging,
thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me.

A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in
jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump
upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking
stile? As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful
tomfoolery. Two calves rubbing noses through a gate were natural and
right and within the order of things; but that human beings, with
salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every side,
could thus--! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face,
and think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be
accounted for and set in tune by that same magical touch in the air;
and it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these
fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by,
unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad,
which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth and
the frolic air.

A puff on the right cheek from my wilful companion sent me off at
a fresh angle, and presently I came in sight of the village church,
sitting solitary within its circle of elms. From forth the vestry
window projected two small legs, gyrating, hungry for foothold, with
larceny--not to say sacrilege--in their every wriggle: a godless sight
for a supporter of the Establishment. Though the rest was hidden, I knew
the legs well enough; they were usually attached to the body of Bill
Saunders, the peerless bad boy of the village. Bill's coveted booty,
too, I could easily guess at that; it came from the Vicar's store
of biscuits, kept (as I knew) in a cupboard along with his official
trappings.

For a moment I hesitated; then I passed on my way. I protest I was not
on Bill's side; but then, neither was I on the Vicar's, and there was
something in this immoral morning which seemed to say that perhaps,
after all, Bill had as much right to the biscuits as the Vicar, and
would certainly enjoy them better; and anyhow it was a disputable point,
and no business of mine. Nature, who had accepted me for ally, cared
little who had the world's biscuits, and assuredly was not going to let
any friend of hers waste his time in playing policeman for Society.

He was tugging at me anew, my insistent guide; and I felt sure, as I
rambled off in his wake, that he had more holiday matter to show me. And
so, indeed, he had; and all of it was to the same lawless tune. Like a
black pirate flag on the blue ocean of air, a hawk hung ominous; then,
plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there rose, thin and
shrill, a piteous voice of squealing.

By the time I got there a whisk of feathers on the turf--like scattered
playbills--was all that remained to tell of the tragedy just enacted.
Yet Nature smiled and sang on, pitiless, gay, impartial. To her, who
took no sides, there was every bit as much to be said for the hawk
as for the chaffinch. Both were her children, and she would show no
preferences.

Further on, a hedgehog lay dead athwart the path--nay, more than dead;
decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in
more bustling circumstances. Nature might at least have paused to shed
one tear over this rough jacketed little son of hers, for his wasted
aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness cut
suddenly short. But not a bit of it! Jubilant as ever, her song went
bubbling on, and “Death-in-Life,” and again, “Life-in-Death,” were its
alternate burdens. And looking round, and seeing the sheep-nibbled heels
of turnips that dotted the ground, their hearts eaten out of them in
frost-bound days now over and done, I seemed to discern, faintly, a
something of the stern meaning in her valorous chant.

My invisible companion was singing also, and seemed at times to be
chuckling softly to himself, doubtless at thought of the strange
new lessons he was teaching me; perhaps, too, at a special bit of
waggishness he had still in store. For when at last he grew weary of
such insignificant earthbound company, he deserted me at a certain
spot I knew; then dropped, subsided, and slunk away into nothingness.
I raised my eyes, and before me, grim and lichened, stood the ancient
whipping-post of the village; its sides fretted with the initials of a
generation that scorned its mute lesson, but still clipped by the stout
rusty shackles that had tethered the wrists of such of that generation's
ancestors as had dared to mock at order and law. Had I been an infant
Sterne, here was a grand chance for sentimental output! As things were,
I could only hurry homewards, my moral tail well between my legs, with
an uneasy feeling, as I glanced back over my shoulder, that there was
more in this chance than met the eye.

And outside our gate I found Charlotte, alone and crying. Edward, it
seemed, had persuaded her to hide, in the full expectation of being duly
found and ecstatically pounced upon; then he had caught sight of the
butcher's cart, and, forgetting his obligations, had rushed off for
a ride. Harold, it further appeared, greatly coveting tadpoles, and
top-heavy with the eagerness of possession, had fallen into the pond.
This, in itself, was nothing; but on attempting to sneak in by the
back-door, he had rendered up his duckweed-bedabbled person into the
hands of an aunt, and had been promptly sent off to bed; and this, on
a holiday, was very much. The moral of the whipping-post was working
itself out; and I was not in the least surprised when, on reaching
home, I was seized upon and accused of doing something I had never even
thought of. And my frame of mind was such, that I could only wish most
heartily that I had done it.




A WHITE-WASHED UNCLE

In our small lives that day was eventful when another uncle was to come
down from town, and submit his character and qualifications (albeit
unconsciously) to our careful criticism. Previous uncles had been
weighed in the balance, and--alas!--found grievously wanting. There was
Uncle Thomas--a failure from the first. Not that his disposition was
malevolent, nor were his habits such as to unfit him for decent society;
but his rooted conviction seemed to be that the reason of a child's
existence was to serve as a butt for senseless adult jokes,--or what,
from the accompanying guffaws of laughter, appeared to be intended for
jokes. Now, we were anxious that he should have a perfectly fair trial;
so in the tool-house, between breakfast and lessons, we discussed
and examined all his witticisms, one by one, calmly, critically,
dispassionately. It was no good; we could not discover any salt in them.
And as only a genuine gift of humour could have saved Uncle Thomas,--for
he pretended to naught besides,--he was reluctantly writ down a hopeless
impostor.

Uncle George--the youngest--was distinctly more promising. He
accompanied us cheerily round the establishment,--suffered himself to be
introduced to each of the cows, held out the right hand of fellowship
to the pig, and even hinted that a pair of pink-eyed Himalayan rabbits
might arrive--unexpectedly--from town some day. We were just considering
whether in this fertile soil an apparently accidental remark on the
solid qualities of guinea-pigs or ferrets might haply blossom and bring
forth fruit, when our governess appeared on the scene. Uncle George's
manner at once underwent a complete and contemptible change. His
interest in rational topics seemed, “like a fountain's sickening pulse,”
 to flag and ebb away; and though Miss Smedley's ostensible purpose was
to take Selina for her usual walk, I can vouch for it that Selina spent
her morning ratting, along with the keeper's boy and me; while, if Miss
Smedley walked with any one, it would appear to have been with Uncle
George.

But despicable as his conduct had been, he underwent no hasty
condemnation. The defection was discussed in all its bearings, but it
seemed sadly clear at last that this uncle must possess some innate
badness of character and fondness for low company. We who from daily
experience knew Miss Smedley like a book--were we not only too
well aware that she had neither accomplishments nor charms, no
characteristic, in fact, but an inbred viciousness of temper and
disposition? True, she knew the dates of the English kings by heart; but
how could that profit Uncle George, who, having passed into the army,
had ascended beyond the need of useful information? Our bows and arrows,
on the other hand, had been freely placed at his disposal; and a soldier
should not have hesitated in his choice a moment. No: Uncle George had
fallen from grace, and was unanimously damned. And the non-arrival
of the Himalayan rabbits was only another nail in his coffin. Uncles,
therefore, were just then a heavy and lifeless market, and there was
little inclination to deal. Still it was agreed that Uncle William, who
had just returned from India, should have as fair a trial as the others;
more especially as romantic possibilities might well be embodied in one
who had held the gorgeous East in fee.

Selina had kicked my shins--like the girl she is!--during a scuffle in
the passage, and I was still rubbing them with one hand when I found
that the uncle-on-approbation was half-heartedly shaking the other. A
florid, elderly man, and unmistakably nervous, he dropped our grimy
paws in succession, and, turning very red, with an awkward simulation of
heartiness, “Well, h' are y' all?” he said, “Glad to see me, eh?” As we
could hardly, in justice, be expected to have formed an opinion on him
at that early stage, we could but look at each other in silence; which
scarce served to relieve the tension of the situation. Indeed, the cloud
never really lifted during his stay. In talking it over later, some
one put forward the suggestion that he must at some time or other have
committed a stupendous crime; but I could not bring myself to believe
that the man, though evidently unhappy, was really guilty of anything;
and I caught him once or twice looking at us with evident kindliness,
though seeing himself observed, he blushed and turned away his head.

When at last the atmosphere was clear of this depressing influence, we
met despondently in the potato-cellar--all of us, that is, but Harold,
who had been told off to accompany his relative to the station; and the
feeling was unanimous, that, at an uncle, William could not be allowed
to pass. Selina roundly declared him a beast, pointing out that he had
not even got us a half-holiday; and, indeed, there seemed little to do
but to pass sentence. We were about to put it, when Harold appeared on
the scene; his red face, round eyes, and mysterious demeanour, hinting
at awful portents. Speechless he stood a space: then, slowly drawing his
hand from the pocket of his knickerbockers, he displayed on a dirty
palm one--two--three--four half-crowns! We could but gaze--tranced,
breathless, mute; never had any of us seen, in the aggregate, so much
bullion before. Then Harold told his tale.

“I took the old fellow to the station,” he said, “and as we went along
I told him all about the station-master's family, and how I had seen
the porter kissing our housemaid, and what a nice fellow he was, with
no airs, or affectation about him, and anything I thought would be of
interest; but he didn't seem to pay much attention, but walked along
puffing his cigar, and once I thought--I'm not certain, but I THOUGHT--I
heard him say, 'Well, thank God, that's over!' When we got to the
station he stopped suddenly, and said, 'Hold on a minute!' Then he
shoved these into my hand in a frightened sort of way; and said, 'Look
here, youngster! These are for you and the other kids. Buy what you
like--make little beasts of yourselves--only don't tell the old people,
mind! Now cut away home!' So I cut.”

A solemn hush fell on the assembly, broken first by the small Charlotte.
“I didn't know,” she observed dreamily, “that there were such good men
anywhere in the world. I hope he'll die to-night, for then he'll go
straight to heaven!” But the repentant Selina bewailed herself with
tears and sobs, refusing to be comforted; for that in her haste she had
called this white-souled relative a beast.

“I'll tell you what we'll do,” said Edward, the master-mind, rising--as
he always did--to the situation: “We'll christen the piebald pig after
him--the one that hasn't got a name yet. And that'll show we're sorry
for our mistake!”

“I--I christened that pig this morning,” Harold guiltily confessed; “I
christened it after the curate. I'm very sorry--but he came and bow'ed
to me last night, after you others had all been sent to bed early--and
somehow I felt I HAD to do it!”

“Oh, but that doesn't count,” said Edward hastily; “because we weren't
all there. We'll take that christening off, and call it Uncle William.
And you can save up the curate for the next litter!”

And the motion being agreed to without a division, the House went into
Committee of Supply.




ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

“Let's pretend,” suggested Harold, “that we're Cavaliers and Roundheads;
and YOU be a Roundhead!”

“O bother,” I replied drowsily, “we pretended that yesterday; and it's
not my turn to be a Roundhead, anyhow.” The fact is, I was lazy, and
the call to arms fell on indifferent ears. We three younger ones were
stretched at length in the orchard. The sun was hot, the season merry
June, and never (I thought) had there been such wealth and riot of
buttercups throughout the lush grass. Green-and-gold was the dominant
key that day. Instead of active “pretence” with its shouts and
perspiration, how much better--I held--to lie at ease and pretend to
one's self, in green and golden fancies, slipping the husk and passing,
a careless lounger, through a sleepy imaginary world all gold and green!
But the persistent Harold was not to be fobbed of.

“Well, then,” he began afresh, “let's pretend we're Knights of the Round
Table; and (with a rush) _I'll_ be Lancelot!”

“I won't play unless I'm Lancelot,” I said. I didn't mean it really, but
the game of Knights always began with this particular contest.

“O PLEASE,” implored Harold. “You know when Edward's here I never get a
chance of being Lancelot. I haven't been Lancelot for weeks!”

Then I yielded gracefully. “All right,” I said. “I'll be Tristram.”

“O, but you can't,” cried Harold again.

“Charlotte has always been Tristram. She won't play unless she's allowed
to be Tristram! Be somebody else this time.”

Charlotte said nothing, but breathed hard, looking straight before her.
The peerless hunter and harper was her special hero of romance, and
rather than see the part in less appreciative hands, she would even have
returned sadly to the stuffy schoolroom.

“I don't care,” I said: “I'll be anything. I'll be Sir Kay. Come on!”

Then once more in this country's story the mail-clad knights paced
through the greenwood shaw, questing adventure, redressing wrong; and
bandits, five to one, broke and fled discomfited to their caves. Once
again were damsels rescued, dragons disembowelled, and giants, in every
corner of the orchard, deprived of their already superfluous number of
heads; while Palamides the Saracen waited for us by the well, and Sir
Breuse Saunce Pite vanished in craven flight before the skilled spear
that was his terror and his bane. Once more the lists were dight in
Camelot, and all was gay with shimmer of silk and gold; the earth shook
with thunder of horses, ash-staves flew in splinters; and the firmament
rang to the clash of sword on helm. The varying fortune of the day swung
doubtful--now on this side, now on that; till at last Lancelot, grim
and great, thrusting through the press, unhorsed Sir Tristram (an easy
task), and bestrode her, threatening doom; while the Cornish knight,
forgetting hard-won fame of old, cried piteously, “You're hurting me,
I tell you! and you're tearing my frock!” Then it happed that Sir Kay,
hurtling to the rescue, stopped short in his stride, catching sight
suddenly, through apple-boughs, of a gleam of scarlet afar off; while
the confused tramp of many horses, mingled with talk and laughter, was
borne to our ears.

“What is it?” inquired Tristram, sitting up and shaking out her curls;
while Lancelot forsook the clanging lists and trotted nimbly to the
hedge.

I stood spell-bound for a moment longer, and then, with a cry of
“Soldiers!” I was off to the hedge, Charlotte picking herself up and
scurrying after.

Down the road they came, two and two, at an easy walk; scarlet flamed in
the eye, bits jingled and saddles squeaked delightfully; while the men,
in a halo of dust, smoked their short clays like the heroes they were.
In a swirl of intoxicating glory the troop clinked and clattered by,
while we shouted and waved, jumping up and down, and the big jolly
horsemen acknowledged the salute with easy condescension. The moment
they were past we were through the hedge and after them. Soldiers were
not the common stuff of everyday life. There had been nothing like this
since the winter before last, when on a certain afternoon--bare of
leaf and monochrome in its hue of sodden fallow and frost-nipt
copse--suddenly the hounds had burst through the fence with their mellow
cry, and all the paddock was for the minute reverberant of thudding hoof
and dotted with glancing red. But this was better, since it could only
mean that blows and bloodshed were in the air.

“Is there going to be a battle?” panted Harold, hardly able to keep up
for excitement.

“Of course there is,” I replied. “We're just in time. Come on!”

Perhaps I ought to have known better; and yet---- The pigs and poultry,
with whom we chiefly consorted, could instruct us little concerning
the peace that in these latter days lapped this sea-girt realm. In the
schoolroom we were just now dallying with the Wars of the Roses; and
did not legends of the country-side inform us how Cavaliers had once
galloped up and down these very lanes from their quarters in the
village? Here, now, were soldiers unmistakable; and if their business
was not fighting, what was it? Sniffing the joy of battle, we followed
hard on their tracks.

“Won't Edward be sorry,” puffed Harold, “that he's begun that beastly
Latin?”

It did, indeed, seem hard. Edward, the most martial spirit of us all,
was drearily conjugating AMO (of all verbs) between four walls; while
Selina, who ever thrilled ecstatic to a red coat, was struggling with
the uncouth German tongue. “Age,” I reflected, “carries its penalties.”

It was a grievous disappointment to us that the troop passed through the
village unmolested. Every cottage, I pointed out to my companions, ought
to have been loopholed, and strongly held. But no opposition was offered
to the soldiers, who, indeed, conducted themselves with a recklessness
and a want of precaution that seemed simply criminal.

At the last cottage a transitory gleam of common sense flickered across
me, and, turning on Charlotte, I sternly ordered her back.

The small maiden, docile but exceedingly dolorous, dragged reluctant
feet homewards, heavy at heart that she was to behold no stout fellows
slain that day; but Harold and I held steadily on, expecting every
instant to see the environing hedges crackle and spit forth the leaden
death.

“Will they be Indians?” inquired my brother (meaning the enemy); “or
Roundheads, or what?”

I reflected. Harold always required direct, straightforward answers--not
faltering suppositions.

“They won't be Indians,” I replied at last; “nor yet Roundheads. There
haven't been any Roundheads seen about here for a long time. They'll be
Frenchmen.”

Harold's face fell. “All right,” he said; “Frenchmen'll do; but I did
hope they'd be Indians.”

“If they were going to be Indians,” I explained, “I--I don't think I'd
go on. Because when Indians take you prisoner they scalp you first, and
then burn you at a stake. But Frenchmen don't do that sort of thing.”

“Are you quite sure?” asked Harold doubtfully.

“Quite,” I replied. “Frenchmen only shut you up in a thing called the
Bastille; and then you get a file sent in to you in a loaf of bread,
and saw the bars through, and slide down a rope, and they all fire at
you--but they don't hit you--and you run down to the seashore as hard as
you can, and swim off to a British frigate, and there you are!”

Harold brightened up again. The programme was rather attractive.

“If they try to take us prisoner,” he said, “we--we won't run, will we?”

Meanwhile, the craven foe was a long time showing himself; and we were
reaching strange outland country, uncivilised, wherein lions might be
expected to prowl at nightfall. I had a stitch in my side, and both
Harold's stockings had come down. Just as I was beginning to have gloomy
doubts of the proverbial courage of Frenchmen, the officer called
out something, the men closed up, and, breaking into a trot, the
troops--already far ahead--vanished out of our sight. With a sinking at
the heart, I began to suspect we had been fooled.

“Are they charging?” cried Harold, weary, but rallying gamely.

“I think not,” I replied doubtfully. “When there's going to be a charge,
the officer always makes a speech, and then they draw their swords and
the trumpets blow, and--but let's try a short cut. We may catch them up
yet.”

So we struck across the fields and into another road, and pounded down
that, and then over more fields, panting, down-hearted, yet hoping for
the best. The sun went in, and a thin drizzle began to fall; we were
muddy, breathless, almost dead beat; but we blundered on, till at last
we struck a road more brutally, more callously unfamiliar than any
road I ever looked upon. Not a hint nor a sign of friendly direction
or assistance on the dogged white face of it. There was no longer
any disguising it--we were hopelessly lost. The small rain continued
steadily, the evening began to come on. Really there are moments when a
fellow is justified in crying; and I would have cried too, if Harold had
not been there. That right-minded child regarded an elder brother as a
veritable god; and I could see that he felt himself as secure as if a
whole Brigade of Guards hedged him round with protecting bayonets. But I
dreaded sore lest he should begin again with his questions.

As I gazed in dumb appeal on the face of unresponsive nature, the sound
of nearing wheels sent a pulse of hope through my being; increasing to
rapture as I recognised in the approaching vehicle the familiar carriage
of the old doctor. If ever a god emerged from a machine, it was when
this heaven-sent friend, recognising us, stopped and jumped out with a
cheery hail. Harold rushed up to him at once. “Have you been there?” he
cried. “Was it a jolly fight? who beat? were there many people killed?”

The doctor appeared puzzled. I briefly explained the situation.

“I see,” said the doctor, looking grave and twisting his face this way
and that. “Well, the fact is, there isn't going to be any battle to-day.
It's been put off, on account of the change in the weather. You will
have due notice of the renewal of hostilities. And now you'd better jump
in and I'll drive you home. You've been running a fine rig! Why, you
might have both been taken and shot as spies!”

This special danger had never even occurred to us. The thrill of it
accentuated the cosey homelike feeling of the cushions we nestled
into as we rolled homewards. The doctor beguiled the journey with
blood-curdling narratives of personal adventure in the tented field, he
having followed the profession of arms (so it seemed) in every quarter
of the globe. Time, the destroyer of all things beautiful, subsequently
revealed the baselessness of these legends; but what of that? There are
higher things than truth; and we were almost reconciled, by the time
we were dropped at our gate, to the fact that the battle had been
postponed.




THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS.

It was the day I was promoted to a tooth-brush. The girls, irrespective
of age, had been thus distinguished some time before; why, we boys could
never rightly understand, except that it was part and parcel of a system
of studied favouritism on behalf of creatures both physically inferior
and (as was shown by a fondness for tale-bearing) of weaker mental
fibre. It was not that we yearned after these strange instruments in
themselves; Edward, indeed, applied his to the scrubbing-out of his
squirrel's cage, and for personal use, when a superior eye was grim
on him, borrowed Harold's or mine, indifferently; but the nimbus of
distinction that clung to them--that we coveted exceedingly. What more,
indeed, was there to ascend to, before the remote, but still possible,
razor and strop?

Perhaps the exaltation had mounted to my head; or nature and the perfect
morning joined to him at disaffection; anyhow, having breakfasted,
and triumphantly repeated the collect I had broken down in the last
Sunday--'twas one without rhythm or alliteration: a most objectionable
collect--having achieved thus much, the small natural man in me
rebelled, and I vowed, as I straddled and spat about the stable-yard in
feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go to the Inventor
of them. It was only geography that morning, any way: and the practical
thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoretic; as for me, I was
going on my travels, and imports and exports, populations and capitals,
might very well wait while I explored the breathing, coloured world
outside.

True, a fellow-rebel was wanted; and Harold might, as a rule, have been
counted on with certainty. But just then Harold was very proud. The week
before he had “gone into tables,” and had been endowed with a new slate,
having a miniature sponge attached, wherewith we washed the faces of
Charlotte's dolls, thereby producing an unhealthy pallor which struck
terror into the child's heart, always timorous regarding epidemic
visitations. As to “tables,” nobody knew exactly what they were,
least of all Harold; but it was a step over the heads of the rest, and
therefore a subject for self-adulation and--generally speaking--airs; so
that Harold, hugging his slate and his chains, was out of the question
now. In such a matter, girls were worse than useless, as wanting the
necessary tenacity of will and contempt for self-constituted authority.
So eventually I slipped through the hedge a solitary protestant, and
issued forth on the lane what time the rest of the civilised world was
sitting down to lessons.

The scene was familiar enough; and yet, this morning, how different
it all seemed! The act, with its daring, tinted everything with new,
strange hues; affecting the individual with a sort of bruised feeling
just below the pit of the stomach, that was intensified whenever his
thoughts flew back to the ink-stained, smelly schoolroom. And could
this be really me? or was I only contemplating, from the schoolroom
aforesaid, some other jolly young mutineer, faring forth under the
genial sun? Anyhow, here was the friendly well, in its old place, half
way up the lane. Hither the yoke-shouldering village-folk were wont to
come to fill their clinking buckets; when the drippings made worms of
wet in the thick dust of the road. They had flat wooden crosses inside
each pail, which floated on the top and (we were instructed) served to
prevent the water from slopping over. We used to wonder by what magic
this strange principle worked, and who first invented the crosses, and
whether he got a peerage for it. But indeed the well was a centre of
mystery, for a hornet's nest was somewhere hard by, and the very thought
was fearsome. Wasps we knew well and disdained, storming them in their
fastnesses. But these great Beasts, vestured in angry orange, three
stings from which--so 't was averred--would kill a horse, these were
of a different kidney, and their warning drone suggested prudence and
retreat. At this time neither villagers nor hornets encroached on the
stillness: lessons, apparently, pervaded all Nature. So, after dabbling
awhile in the well--what boy has ever passed a bit of water
without messing in it?--I scrambled through the hedge, avoiding the
hornet-haunted side, and struck into the silence of the copse.

If the lane had been deserted, this was loneliness become personal. Here
mystery lurked and peeped; here brambles caught and held with a purpose
of their own, and saplings whipped the face with human spite. The copse,
too, proved vaster in extent, more direfully drawn out, than one would
ever have guessed from its frontage on the lane: and I was really glad
when at last the wood opened and sloped down to a streamlet brawling
forth into the sunlight. By this cheery companion I wandered along,
conscious of little but that Nature, in providing store of water-rats,
had thoughtfully furnished provender of right-sized stones. Rapids,
also, there were, telling of canoes and portages--crinkling bays and
inlets--caves for pirates and hidden treasures--the wise Dame had
forgotten nothing--till at last, after what lapse of time I know not, my
further course, though not the stream's, was barred by some six feet
of stout wire netting, stretched from side to side, just where a thick
hedge, arching till it touched, forbade all further view.

The excitement of the thing was becoming thrilling. A Black Flag
must surely be fluttering close by. Here was evidently a malignant
contrivance of the Pirates, designed to baffle our gun-boats when we
dashed up-stream to shell them from their lair. A gun-boat, indeed,
might well have hesitated, so stout was the netting, so close the hedge:
but I spied where a rabbit was wont to pass, close down by the water's
edge; where a rabbit could go a boy could follow, albeit stomach-wise
and with one leg in the stream; so the passage was achieved, and I stood
inside, safe but breathless at the sight.

Gone was the brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland.
Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stone-edged,
urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed and
educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on occasion
gleams of red hinted at gold-fish in among the spreading water-lilies.
The scene lay silent and slumbrous in the brooding noonday sun: the
drowsing peacock squatted humped on the lawn, no fish leapt in
the pools, nor bird declared himself from the environing hedges.
Self-confessed it was here, then, at last the Garden of Sleep!

Two things, in those old days, I held in especial distrust: gamekeepers
and gardeners. Seeing, however, no baleful apparitions of either nature,
I pursued my way between rich flower-beds, in search of the necessary
Princess. Conditions declared her presence patently as trumpets; without
this centre such surroundings could not exist. A pavilion, gold topped,
wreathed with lush jessamine, beckoned with a special significance over
close-set shrubs. There, if anywhere, She should be enshrined. Instinct,
and some knowledge of the habits of princesses, triumphed; for (indeed)
there She was! In no tranced repose, however, but laughingly, struggling
to disengage her hand from the grasp of a grown-up man who occupied the
marble bench with her. (As to age, I suppose now that the two swung in
respective scales that pivoted on twenty. But children heed no minor
distinctions; to them, the inhabited world is composed of the two main
divisions: children and upgrown people; the latter being in no way
superior to the former--only hopelessly different. These two, then,
belonged to the grown-up section.) I paused, thinking it strange
they should prefer seclusion when there were fish to be caught, and
butterflies to hunt in the sun outside; and as I cogitated thus, the
grown-up man caught sight of me.

“Hallo, sprat!” he said, with some abruptness, “where do you spring
from?”

“I came up the stream,” I explained politely and comprehensively, “and I
was only looking for the Princess.”

“Then you are a water-baby,” he replied. “And what do you think of the
Princess, now you've found her?”

“I think she is lovely,” I said (and doubtless I was right, having never
learned to flatter). “But she's wide-awake, so I suppose somebody has
kissed her!”

This very natural deduction moved the grown-up man to laughter; but
the Princess, turning red and jumping up, declared that it was time for
lunch.

“Come along, then,” said the grown-up man; “and you too, Water-baby;
come and have something solid. You must want it.”

I accompanied them, without any feeling of false delicacy. The world,
as known to me, was spread with food each several mid-day, and the
particular table one sat at seemed a matter of no importance. The palace
was very sumptuous and beautiful, just what a palace ought to be; and
we were met by a stately lady, rather more grownup than the
Princess--apparently her mother.

My friend the Man was very kind, and introduced me as the Captain,
saying I had just run down from Aldershot. I didn't know where Aldershot
was, but had no manner of doubt that he was perfectly right. As a rule,
indeed, grown-up people are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in
the higher gift of imagination that they are so sadly to seek.

The lunch was excellent and varied. Another gentleman in beautiful
clothes--a lord, presumably--lifted me into a high carved chair, and
stood behind it, brooding over me like a Providence. I endeavoured to
explain who I was and where I had come from, and to impress the company
with my own tooth-brush and Harold's tables; but either they were
stupid--or is it a characteristic of Fairyland that every one laughs at
the most ordinary remarks? My friend the Man said good-naturedly, “All
right, Water-baby; you came up the stream, and that's good enough for
us.” The lord--a reserved sort of man, I thought--took no share in the
conversation.

After lunch I walked on the terrace with the Princess and my friend the
Man, and was very proud. And I told him what I was going to be, and he
told me what he was going to be; and then I remarked, “I suppose you
two are going to get married?” He only laughed, after the Fairy fashion.
“Because if you aren't,” I added, “you really ought to”: meaning only
that a man who discovered a Princess, living in the right sort of
Palace like this, and didn't marry her there and then, was false to all
recognised tradition.

They laughed again, and my friend suggested I should go down to the pond
and look at the gold-fish, while they went for a stroll.

I was sleepy, and assented; but before they left me, the grown-up
man put two half-crowns in my hand, for the purpose, he explained, of
treating the other water-babies. I was so touched by this crowning
mark of friendship that I nearly cried; and thought much more of his
generosity than of the fact that the Princess; ere she moved away,
stooped down and kissed me.

I watched them disappear down the path--how naturally arms seem to
go round waists in Fairyland!--and then, my cheek on the cool marble,
lulled by the trickle of water, I slipped into dreamland out of real and
magic world alike. When I woke, the sun had gone in, a chill wind set
all the leaves a-whispering, and the peacock on the lawn was harshly
calling up the rain. A wild unreasoning panic possessed me, and I sped
out of the garden like a guilty thing, wriggled through the rabbit-run,
and threaded my doubtful way homewards, hounded by nameless terrors. The
half-crowns happily remained solid and real to the touch; but could I
hope to bear such treasure safely through the brigand-haunted wood? It
was a dirty, weary little object that entered its home, at nightfall, by
the unassuming aid of the scullery-window: and only to be sent tealess
to bed seemed infinite mercy to him. Officially tealess, that is; for,
as was usual after such escapades, a sympathetic housemaid, coming
delicately by backstairs, stayed him with chunks of cold pudding and
condolence, till his small skin was tight as any drum. Then, nature
asserting herself, I passed into the comforting kingdom of sleep, where,
a golden carp of fattest build, I oared it in translucent waters with
a new half-crown snug under right fin and left; and thrust up a nose
through water-lily leaves to be kissed by a rose-flushed Princess.




SAWDUST AND SIN

A belt of rhododendrons grew close down to one side of our pond; and
along the edge of it many things flourished rankly. If you crept through
the undergrowth and crouched by the water's rim, it was easy--if your
imagination were in healthy working order--to transport yourself in a
trice to the heart of a tropical forest. Overhead the monkeys chattered,
parrots flashed from bough to bough, strange large blossoms shone around
you, and the push and rustle of great beasts moving unseen thrilled you
deliciously. And if you lay down with your nose an inch or two from the
water, it was not long ere the old sense of proportion vanished clean
away. The glittering insects that darted to and fro on its surface
became sea-monsters dire, the gnats that hung above them swelled to
albatrosses, and the pond itself stretched out into a vast inland sea,
whereon a navy might ride secure, and whence at any moment the hairy
scalp of a sea serpent might be seen to emerge.

It is impossible, however, to play at tropical forests properly, when
homely accents of the human voice intrude; and all my hopes of seeing a
tiger seized by a crocodile while drinking (vide picture-books, passim)
vanished abruptly, and earth resumed her old dimensions, when the
sound of Charlotte's prattle somewhere hard by broke in on my primeval
seclusion. Looking out from the bushes, I saw her trotting towards an
open space of lawn the other side the pond, chattering to herself in her
accustomed fashion, a doll tucked under either arm, and her brow knit
with care. Propping up her double burden against a friendly stump, she
sat down in front of them, as full of worry and anxiety as a Chancellor
on a Budget night.

Her victims, who stared resignedly in front of them, were recognisable
as Jerry and Rosa. Jerry hailed from far Japan: his hair was straight
and black; his one garment cotton, of a simple blue; and his reputation
was distinctly bad. Jerome was his proper name, from his supposed
likeness to the holy man who hung in a print on the staircase; though
a shaven crown was the only thing in common 'twixt Western saint and
Eastern sinner. Rosa was typical British, from her flaxen poll to the
stout calves she displayed so liberally, and in character she was of the
blameless order of those who have not yet been found out.

I suspected Jerry from the first; there was a latent devilry in his
slant eyes as he sat there moodily, and knowing what he was capable of
I scented trouble in store for Charlotte. Rosa I was not so sure about;
she sat demurely and upright, and looked far away into the tree-tops
in a visionary, world-forgetting sort of way; yet the prim purse of her
mouth was somewhat overdone, and her eyes glittered unnaturally.

“Now, I'm going to begin where I left off,” said Charlotte, regardless
of stops, and thumping the turf with her fist excitedly: “and you must
pay attention, 'cos this is a treat, to have a story told you before
you're put to bed. Well, so the White Rabbit scuttled off down the
passage and Alice hoped he'd come back 'cos he had a waistcoat on and
her flamingo flew up a tree--but we haven't got to that part yet--you
must wait a minute, and--where had I got to?”

Jerry only remained passive until Charlotte had got well under way, and
then began to heel over quietly in Rosa's direction. His head fell on
her plump shoulder, causing her to start nervously.

Charlotte seized and shook him with vigour, “O Jerry,” she cried
piteously, “if you're not going to be good, how ever shall I tell you my
story?”

Jerry's face was injured innocence itself. “Blame if you like, Madam,”
 he seemed to say, “the eternal laws of gravitation, but not a helpless
puppet, who is also an orphan and a stranger in the land.”

“Now we'll go on,” began Charlotte once more. “So she got into the
garden at last--I've left out a lot, but you won't care, I'll tell you
some other time--and they were all playing croquet, and that's where the
flamingo comes in, and the Queen shouted out, 'Off with her head!'”

At this point Jerry collapsed forward, suddenly and completely, his
bald pate between his knees. Charlotte was not very angry this time. The
sudden development of tragedy in the story had evidently been too much
for the poor fellow. She straightened him out, wiped his nose, and,
after trying him in various positions, to which he refused to adapt
himself, she propped him against the shoulder of the (apparently)
unconscious Rosa. Then my eyes were opened, and the full measure of
Jerry's infamy became apparent. This, then, was what he had been playing
up for. The fellow had designs. I resolved to keep him under close
observation.

“If you'd been in the garden,” went on Charlotte, reproachfully, “and
flopped down like that when the Queen said 'Off with his head!' she'd
have offed with your head; but Alice wasn't that sort of girl at all.
She just said, 'I'm not afraid of you, you're nothing but a pack of
cards'--oh, dear! I've got to the end already, and I hadn't begun
hardly! I never can make my stories last out! Never mind, I'll tell you
another one.”

Jerry didn't seem to care, now he had gained his end, whether the
stories lasted out or not. He was nestling against Rosa's plump form
with a look of satisfaction that was simply idiotic; and one arm had
disappeared from view--was it round her waist? Rosa's natural blush
seemed deeper than usual, her head inclined shyly--it must have been
round her waist.

“If it wasn't so near your bedtime,” continued Charlotte, reflectively,
“I'd tell you a nice story with a bogy in it. But you'd be frightened,
and you'd dream of bogies all night. So I'll tell you one about a White
Bear, only you mustn't scream when the bear says 'Wow,' like I used to,
'cos he's a good bear really--”

Here Rosa fell flat on her back in the deadest of faints. Her limbs were
rigid, her eyes glassy; what had Jerry been doing? It must have been
something very bad, for her to take on like that. I scrutinised him
carefully, while Charlotte ran to comfort the damsel. He appeared to be
whistling a tune and regarding the scenery. If I only possessed Jerry's
command of feature, I thought to myself, half regretfully, I would never
be found out in anything.

“It's all your fault, Jerry,” said Charlotte, reproachfully, when the
lady had been restored to consciousness: “Rosa's as good as gold, except
when you make her wicked. I'd put you in the corner, only a stump hasn't
got a corner--wonder why that is? Thought everything had corners. Never
mind, you'll have to sit with your face to the wall--SO. Now you can
sulk if you like!”

Jerry seemed to hesitate a moment between the bliss of indulgence
in sulks with a sense of injury, and the imperious summons of beauty
waiting to be wooed at his elbow; then, carried away by his passion, he
fell sideways across Rosa's lap. One arm stuck stiffly upwards, as in
passionate protestation; his amorous countenance was full of entreaty.
Rosa hesitated--wavered--and yielded, crushing his slight frame under
the weight of her full-bodied surrender.

Charlotte had stood a good deal, but it was possible to abuse even her
patience. Snatching Jerry from his lawless embraces, she reversed him
across her knee, and then--the outrage offered to the whole superior
sex in Jerry's hapless person was too painful to witness; but though
I turned my head away, the sound of brisk slaps continued to reach my
tingling ears. When I looked again, Jerry was sitting up as before; his
garment, somewhat crumpled, was restored to its original position; but
his pallid countenance was set hard. Knowing as I did, only too
well, what a volcano of passion and shame must be seething under that
impassive exterior, for the moment I felt sorry for him.

Rosa's face was still buried in her frock; it might have been shame, it
might have been grief for Jerry's sufferings. But the callous Japanese
never even looked her way. His heart was exceeding bitter within him.
In merely following up his natural impulses he had run his head against
convention, and learnt how hard a thing it was; and the sunshiny world
was all black to him.

Even Charlotte softened somewhat at the sight of his rigid misery. “If
you'll say you're sorry. Jerome,” she said, “I'll say I'm sorry, too.”

Jerry only dropped his shoulders against the stump and stared out in the
direction of his dear native Japan, where love was no sin, and smacking
had not been introduced. Why had he ever left it? He would go back
to-morrow--and yet there were obstacles: another grievance. Nature,
in endowing Jerry with every grace of form and feature, along with a
sensitive soul, had somehow forgotten the gift of locomotion.

There was a crackling in the bushes behind me, with sharp short pants as
of a small steam-engine, and Rollo, the black retriever, just released
from his chain by some friendly hand, burst through the underwood,
seeking congenial company. I joyfully hailed him to stop and be a
panther; but he sped away round the pond, upset Charlotte with a
boisterous caress, and seizing Jerry by the middle, disappeared with him
down the drive. Charlotte raved, panting behind the swift-footed avenger
of crime; Rosa lay dishevelled, bereft of consciousness; Jerry himself
spread helpless arms to heaven, and I almost thought I heard a cry for
mercy, a tardy promise of amendment; but it was too late. The Black Man
had got Jerry at last; and though the tear of sensibility might moisten
the eye, no one who really knew him could deny the justice of his fate.




“YOUNG ADAM CUPID”

NO one would have suspected Edward of being in love, but that after
breakfast, with an over-acted carelessness, “Anybody who likes,” he
said, “can feed my rabbits,” and he disappeared, with a jauntiness that
deceived nobody, in the direction of the orchard. Now, kingdoms might
totter and reel, and convulsions change the map of Europe; but the iron
unwritten law prevailed, that each boy severely fed his own rabbits.
There was good ground, then, for suspicion and alarm; and while
the lettuce-leaves were being drawn through the wires, Harold and I
conferred seriously on the situation.

It may be thought that the affair was none of our business; and indeed
we cared little as individuals. We were only concerned as members of a
corporation, for each of whom the mental or physical ailment of one of
his fellows might have far-reaching effects. It was thought best that
Harold, as least open to suspicion of motive, should be despatched to
probe and peer. His instructions were, to proceed by a report on the
health of our rabbits in particular; to glide gently into a discussion
on rabbits in general, their customs, practices, and vices; to pass
thence, by a natural transition, to the female sex, the inherent flaws
in its composition, and the reasons for regarding it (speaking broadly)
as dirt. He was especially to be very diplomatic, and then to return and
report progress. He departed on his mission gaily; but his absence was
short, and his return, discomfited and in tears, seemed to betoken some
want of parts for diplomacy. He had found Edward, it appeared, pacing
the orchard, with the sort of set smile that mountebanks wear in their
precarious antics, fixed painfully on his face, as with pins. Harold had
opened well, on the rabbit subject, but, with a fatal confusion between
the abstract and the concrete, had then gone on to remark that Edward's
lop-eared doe, with her long hindlegs and contemptuous twitch of the
nose, always reminded him of Sabina Larkin (a nine-year-old damsel,
child of a neighbouring farmer): at which point Edward, it would seem,
had turned upon and savagely maltreated him, twisting his arm and
punching him in the short ribs. So that Harold returned to the
rabbit-hutches preceded by long-drawn wails: anon wishing, with sobs,
that he were a man, to kick his love-lorn brother: anon lamenting that
ever he had been born.

I was not big enough to stand up to Edward personally, so I had to
console the sufferer by allowing him to grease the wheels of the
donkey-cart--a luscious treat that had been specially reserved for me,
a week past, by the gardener's boy, for putting in a good word on his
behalf with the new kitchen-maid. Harold was soon all smiles and grease;
and I was not, on the whole, dissatisfied with the significant hint that
had been gained as to the fons et origo mali.

Fortunately, means were at hand for resolving any doubts on the subject,
since the morning was Sunday, and already the bells were ringing for
church. Lest the connexion may not be evident at first sight, I should
explain that the gloomy period of church-time, with its enforced
inaction and its lack of real interest--passed, too, within sight of all
that the village held of fairest--was just the one when a young man's
fancies lightly turned to thoughts of love. For such trifling the rest
of the week afforded no leisure; but in church--well, there was really
nothing else to do! True, naughts-and-crosses might be indulged in on
fly-leaves of prayer-books while the Litany dragged its slow length
along; but what balm or what solace could be found for the sermon?
Naturally the eye, wandering here and there among the serried ranks,
made bold, untrammelled choice among our fair fellow-supplicants. It was
in this way that, some months earlier, under the exceptional strain of
the Athanasian Creed, my roving fancy had settled upon the baker's wife
as a fit object for a life-long devotion. Her riper charms had conquered
a heart which none of her be-muslined, tittering juniors had been able
to subdue; and that she was already wedded had never occurred to me
as any bar to my affection. Edward's general demeanour, then, during
morning service, was safe to convict him; but there was also a special
test for the particular case. It happened that we sat in a transept,
and, the Larkins being behind us, Edward's only chance of feasting on
Sabina's charms was in the all-too fleeting interval when we swung round
eastwards. I was not mistaken. During the singing of the Benedictus the
impatient one made several false starts, and at last he slewed fairly
round before “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be” was
half finished. The evidence was conclusive: a court of law could have
desired no better.

The fact being patent, the next thing was to grapple with it; and my
mind was fully occupied during the sermon. There was really nothing
unfair or unbrotherly in my attitude. A philosophic affection such as
mine own, which clashed with nothing, was (I held) permissible; but the
volcanic passions in which Edward indulged about once a quarter were
a serious interference with business. To make matters worse, next week
there was a circus coming to the neighbourhood, to which we had all been
strictly forbidden to go; and without Edward no visit in contempt of law
and orders could be successfully brought off. I had sounded him as to
the circus on our way to church, and he had replied briefly that the
very thought of a clown made him sick. Morbidity could no further
go. But the sermon came to an end without any line of conduct having
suggested itself; and I walked home in some depression, feeling sadly
that Venus was in the ascendant and in direful opposition, while
Auriga--the circus star--drooped declinant, perilously near the horizon.

By the irony of fate, Aunt Eliza, of all people, turned out to be the
Dea ex machina: which thing fell out in this wise. It was that lady's
obnoxious practice to issue forth, of a Sunday afternoon, on a visit of
state to such farmers and cottagers as dwelt at hand; on which occasion
she was wont to hale a reluctant boy along with her, from the mixed
motives of propriety and his soul's health. Much cudgelling of brains,
I suppose, had on that particular day made me torpid and unwary. Anyhow,
when a victim came to be sought for, I fell an easy prey, while the
others fled scatheless and whooping. Our first visit was to the Larkins.
Here ceremonial might be viewed in its finest flower, and we conducted
ourselves, like Queen Elizabeth when she trod the measure, “high and
disposedly.” In the low, oak-panelled parlour, cake and currant wine
were set forth, and after courtesies and compliments exchanged, Aunt
Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs Larkin; while
the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort, exchanged remarks
on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall in the price of
corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only two short days ago
we had confronted each other on either side of a hedge,--I triumphant,
provocative, derisive; he flushed, wroth, cracking his whip, and
volleying forth profanity? So powerful is all-subduing ceremony!) Sabina
the while, demurely seated with a Pilgrim's Progress on her knee, and
apparently absorbed in a brightly coloured presentment of “Apollyon
Straddling Right across the Way,” eyed me at times with shy interest;
but repelled all Aunt Eliza's advances with a frigid politeness for
which I could not sufficiently admire her.

“It's surprising to me,” I heard my aunt remark presently, “how my
eldest nephew, Edward, despises little girls. I heard him tell Charlotte
the other day that he wished he could exchange her for a pair
of Japanese guinea-pigs. It made the poor child cry. Boys are so
heartless!” (I saw Sabina stiffen as she sat, and her tip-tilted nose
twitched scornfully.) “Now this boy here--” (my soul descended into my
very boots. Could the woman have intercepted any of my amorous glances
at the baker's wife?) “Now this boy,” my aunt went on, “is more human
altogether. Only yesterday he took his sister to the baker's shop, and
spent his only penny buying her sweets. I thought it showed such a nice
disposition. I wish Edward were more like him!”

I breathed again. It was unnecessary to explain my real motives for that
visit to the baker's. Sabina's face softened, and her contemptuous nose
descended from its altitude of scorn; she gave me one shy glance of
kindness, and then concentrated her attention upon Mercy knocking at the
Wicket Gate. I felt awfully mean as regarded Edward; but what could I
do? I was in Gaza, gagged and bound; the Philistines hemmed me in.

The same evening the storm burst, the bolt fell, and--to continue the
metaphor--the atmosphere grew serene and clear once more. The evening
service was shorter than usual, the vicar, as he ascended the pulpit
steps, having dropped two pages out of his sermon-case,--unperceived by
any but ourselves, either at the moment or subsequently when the hiatus
was reached; so as we joyfully shuffled out I whispered Edward that
by racing home at top speed we should make time to assume our bows and
arrows (laid aside for the day) and play at Indians and buffaloes with
Aunt Eliza's fowls--already strolling roostwards, regardless of their
doom--before that sedately stepping lady could return. Edward hung at
the door, wavering; the suggestion had unhallowed charms.

At that moment Sabina issued primly forth, and, seeing Edward, put out
her tongue at him in the most exasperating manner conceivable; then
passed on her way, her shoulders rigid, her dainty head held high. A
man can stand very much in the cause of love: poverty, aunts, rivals,
barriers of every sort,--all these only serve to fan the flame. But
personal ridicule is a shaft that reaches the very vitals. Edward led
the race home at a speed which one of Ballantyne's heroes might have
equalled but never surpassed; and that evening the Indians dispersed
Aunt Eliza's fowls over several square miles of country, so that
the tale of them remaineth incomplete unto this day. Edward himself,
cheering wildly, pursued the big Cochin-China cock till the bird sank
gasping under the drawing-room window, whereat its mistress stood
petrified; and after supper, in the shrubbery, smoked a half-consumed
cigar he had picked up in the road, and declared to an awe-stricken
audience his final, his immitigable, resolve to go into the army.

The crisis was past, and Edward was saved!... And yet... sunt lachrymae
rerem... to me watching the cigar-stump alternately pale and glow
against the dark background of laurel, a vision of a tip-tilted nose,
of a small head poised scornfully, seemed to hover on the gathering
gloom--seemed to grow and fade and grow again, like the grin of the
Cheshire cat--pathetically, reproachfully even; and the charms of the
baker's wife slipped from my memory like snow-wreaths in thaw. After
all, Sabina was nowise to blame: why should the child be punished?
To-morrow I would give them the slip, and stroll round by her garden
promiscuous-like, at a time when the farmer was safe in the rick-yard.
If nothing came of it, there was no harm done; and if on the
contrary...!




THE BURGLARS

It was much too fine a night to think of going to bed at once, and so,
although the witching hour of nine P.M. had struck, Edward and I were
still leaning out of the open window in our nightshirts, watching the
play of the cedar-branch shadows on the moonlit lawn, and planning
schemes of fresh devilry for the sunshiny morrow. From below, strains of
the jocund piano declared that the Olympians were enjoying themselves
in their listless, impotent way; for the new curate had been bidden to
dinner that night, and was at the moment unclerically proclaiming to all
the world that he feared no foe. His discordant vociferations doubtless
started a train of thought in Edward's mind, for the youth presently
remarked, a propos of nothing that had been said before, “I believe the
new curate's rather gone on Aunt Maria.”

I scouted the notion. “Why, she's quite old,” I said. (She must have
seen some five-and-twenty summers.)

“Of course she is,” replied Edward, scornfully. “It's not her, it's her
money he's after, you bet!”

“Didn't know she had any money,” I observed timidly.

“Sure to have,” said my brother, with confidence. “Heaps and heaps.”

Silence ensued, both our minds being busy with the new situation thus
presented,--mine, in wonderment at this flaw that so often declared
itself in enviable natures of fullest endowment,--in a grown-up man
and a good cricketer, for instance, even as this curate; Edward's
(apparently), in the consideration of how such a state of things,
supposing it existed, could be best turned to his own advantage.

“Bobby Ferris told me,” began Edward in due course, “that there was a
fellow spooning his sister once--”

“What's spooning?” I asked meekly.

“Oh, _I_ dunno,” said Edward, indifferently. “It's--it's--it's just a
thing they do, you know. And he used to carry notes and messages and
things between 'em, and he got a shilling almost every time.”

“What, from each of 'em?” I innocently inquired.

Edward looked at me with scornful pity. “Girls never have any money,” he
briefly explained. “But she did his exercises and got him out of rows,
and told stories for him when he needed it--and much better ones than he
could have made up for himself. Girls are useful in some ways. So he
was living in clover, when unfortunately they went and quarrelled about
something.”

“Don't see what that's got to do with it,” I said.

“Nor don't I,” rejoined Edward. “But anyhow the notes and things
stopped, and so did the shillings. Bobby was fairly cornered, for he
had bought two ferrets on tick, and promised to pay a shilling a week,
thinking the shillings were going on for ever, the silly young ass. So
when the week was up, and he was being dunned for the shilling, he went
off to the fellow and said, 'Your broken-hearted Bella implores you to
meet her at sundown,--by the hollow oak, as of old, be it only for
a moment. Do not fail!' He got all that out of some rotten book, of
course. The fellow looked puzzled and said,--

“'What hollow oak? I don't know any hollow oak.'

“'Perhaps it was the Royal Oak?' said Bobby promptly, 'cos he saw he
had made a slip, through trusting too much to the rotten book; but this
didn't seem to make the fellow any happier.”

“Should think not,” I said, “the Royal Oak's an awful low sort of pub.”

“I know,” said Edward. “Well, at last the fellow said, 'I think I know
what she means: the hollow tree in your father's paddock. It happens to
be an elm, but she wouldn't know the difference. All right: say I'll be
there.' Bobby hung about a bit, for he hadn't got his money. 'She was
crying awfully,' he said. Then he got his shilling.”

“And wasn't the fellow riled,” I inquired, “when he got to the place and
found nothing?”

“He found Bobby,” said Edward, indignantly. “Young Ferris was a
gentleman, every inch of him. He brought the fellow another message from
Bella: 'I dare not leave the house. My cruel parents immure me closely
If you only knew what I suffer. Your broken-hearted Bella.' Out of the
same rotten book. This made the fellow a little suspicious, 'cos it was
the old Ferrises who had been keen about the thing all through: the
fellow, you see, had tin.”

“But what's that got to--” I began again.

“Oh, _I_ dunno,” said Edward, impatiently. “I'm telling you just what
Bobby told me. He got suspicious, anyhow, but he couldn't exactly call
Bella's brother a liar, so Bobby escaped for the time. But when he was
in a hole next week, over a stiff French exercise, and tried the same
sort of game on his sister, she was too sharp for him, and he got caught
out. Somehow women seem more mistrustful than men. They're so beastly
suspicious by nature, you know.”

“_I_ know,” said I. “But did the two--the fellow and the sister--make it
up afterwards?”

“I don't remember about that,” replied Edward, indifferently; “but Bobby
got packed off to school a whole year earlier than his people meant to
send him,--which was just what he wanted. So you see it all came right
in the end!”

I was trying to puzzle out the moral of this story--it was evidently
meant to contain one somewhere--when a flood of golden lamplight mingled
with the moon rays on the lawn, and Aunt Maria and the new curate
strolled out on the grass below us, and took the direction of a garden
seat that was backed by a dense laurel shrubbery reaching round in a
half-circle to the house. Edward mediated moodily. “If we only knew what
they were talking about,” said he, “you'd soon see whether I was right
or not. Look here! Let's send the kid down by the porch to reconnoitre!”

“Harold's asleep,” I said; “it seems rather a shame--”

“Oh, rot!” said my brother; “he's the youngest, and he's got to do as
he's told!”

So the luckless Harold was hauled out of bed and given his
sailing-orders. He was naturally rather vexed at being stood up suddenly
on the cold floor, and the job had no particular interest for him; but
he was both staunch and well disciplined. The means of exit were simple
enough. A porch of iron trellis came up to within easy reach of the
window, and was habitually used by all three of us, when modestly
anxious to avoid public notice. Harold climbed deftly down the porch
like a white rat, and his night gown glimmered a moment on the gravel
walk ere he was lost to sight in the darkness of the shrubbery. A brief
interval of silence ensued, broken suddenly by a sound of scuffle, and
then a shrill, long-drawn squeal, as of metallic surfaces in friction.
Our scout had fallen into the hands of the enemy!

Indolence alone had made us devolve the task of investigation on our
younger brother. Now that danger had declared itself, there was no
hesitation. In a second we were down the side of the porch, and crawling
Cherokee-wise through the laurels to the back of the garden-seat.
Piteous was the sight that greeted us. Aunt Maria was on the seat, in
a white evening frock, looking--for an aunt--really quite nice. On the
lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother by a large
ear, which--judging from the row he was making--seemed on the point
of parting company with the head it adorned. The gruesome noise he was
emitting did not really affect us otherwise than aesthetically. To
one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical anguish is easy
distinguishable from the pumped-up ad misericordiam blubber. Harold's
could clearly be recognised as belonging to the latter class. “Now, you
young--” (whelp, _I_ think it was, but Edward stoutly maintains it was
devil), said the curate, sternly; “tell us what you mean by it!”

“Well, leggo of my ear then!” shrilled Harold, “and I'll tell you the
solemn truth!”

“Very well,” agreed the curate, releasing him; “now go ahead, and don't
lie more than you can help.”

We abode the promised disclosure without the least misgiving; but even
we had hardly given Harold due credit for his fertility of resource and
powers of imagination.

“I had just finished saying my prayers,” began that young gentleman,
slowly, “when I happened to look out of the window, and on the lawn I
saw a sight which froze the marrow in my veins! A burglar was
approaching the house with snake-like tread! He had a scowl and a dark
lantern, and he was armed to the teeth!”

We listened with interest. The style, though unlike Harold's native
notes, seemed strangely familiar.

“Go on,” said the curate, grimly.

“Pausing in his stealthy career,” continued Harold, “he gave a low
whistle. Instantly the signal was responded to, and from the adjacent
shadows two more figures glided forth. The miscreants were both armed to
the teeth.”

“Excellent,” said the curate; “proceed.”

“The robber chief,” pursued Harold, warming to his work, “joined
his nefarious comrades, and conversed with them in silent tones. His
expression was truly ferocious, and I ought to have said that he was
armed to the t--”

“There, never mind his teeth,” interrupted the curate, rudely; “there's
too much jaw about you altogether. Hurry up and have done.”

“I was in a frightful funk,” continued the narrator, warily guarding his
ear with his hand, “but just then the drawing-room window opened, and
you and Aunt Maria came out--I mean emerged. The burglars vanished
silently into the laurels, with horrid implications!”

The curate looked slightly puzzled. The tale was well sustained, and
certainly circumstantial. After all, the boy might have really seen
something. How was the poor man to know--though the chaste and lofty
diction might have supplied a hint--that the whole yarn was a free
adaptation from the last Penny Dreadful lent us by the knife-and-boot
boy?

“Why did you not alarm the house?” he asked.

“'Cos I was afraid,” said Harold, sweetly, “that p'raps they mightn't
believe me!”

“But how did you get down here, you naughty little boy?” put in Aunt
Maria.

Harold was hard pressed--by his own flesh and blood, too!

At that moment Edward touched me on the shoulder and glided off through
the laurels. When some ten yards away he gave a low whistle. I replied
by another. The effect was magical. Aunt Maria started up with a shriek.
Harold gave one startled glance around, and then fled like a hare, made
straight for the back door, burst in upon the servants at supper, and
buried himself in the broad bosom of the cook, his special ally. The
curate faced the laurels--hesitatingly. But Aunt Maria flung herself on
him. “O Mr. Hodgitts!” I heard her cry, “you are brave! for my sake do
not be rash!” He was not rash. When I peeped out a second later, the
coast was entirely clear.

By this time there were sounds of a household timidly emerging; and
Edward remarked to me that perhaps we had better be off. Retreat was an
easy matter. A stunted laurel gave a leg up on to the garden wall, which
led in its turn to the roof of an out-house, up which, at a dubious
angle, we could crawl to the window of the box-room. This overland route
had been revealed to us one day by the domestic cat, when hard
pressed in the course of an otter-hunt, in which the cat--somewhat
unwillingly--was filling the title role; and it had proved distinctly
useful on occasions like the present. We were snug in bed--minus some
cuticle from knees and elbows--and Harold, sleepily chewing something
sticky, had been carried up in the arms of the friendly cook, ere the
clamour of the burglar-hunters had died away.

The curate's undaunted demeanour, as reported by Aunt Maria, was
generally supposed to have terrified the burglars into flight, and much
kudos accrued to him thereby. Some days later, however, when he hid
dropped in to afternoon tea, and was making a mild curatorial joke
about the moral courage required for taking the last piece of
bread-and-butter, I felt constrained to remark dreamily, and as it were
to the universe at large, “Mr. Hodgitts! you are brave! for my sake, do
not be rash!”

Fortunately for me, the vicar was also a caller on that day; and it was
always a comparatively easy matter to dodge my long-coated friend in the
open.




A HARVESTING

The year was in its yellowing time, and the face of Nature a study in
old gold. “A field or, semee, with garbs of the same:” it may be false
Heraldry--Nature's generally is--but it correctly blazons the display
that Edward and I considered from the rickyard gate, Harold was not
on in this scene, being stretched upon the couch of pain; the special
disorder stomachic, as usual.

The evening before, Edward, in a fit of unwonted amiability, had deigned
to carve me out a turnip lantern, an art-and-craft he was peculiarly
deft in; and Harold, as the interior of the turnip flew out in scented
fragments under the hollowing knife, had eaten largely thereof:
regarding all such jetsam as his special perquisite. Now he was dreeing
his weird, with such assistance as the chemist could afford. But Edward
and I, knowing that this particular field was to be carried to-day,
were revelling in the privilege of riding in the empty waggons from the
rickyard back to the sheaves, whence we returned toilfully on foot,
to career it again over the billowy acres in these great galleys of
a stubble sea. It was the nearest approach to sailing that we inland
urchins might compass: and hence it ensued, that such stirring scenes as
Sir Richard Grenville on the Revenge, the smoke-wreathed Battle of the
Nile, and the Death of Nelson, had all been enacted in turn on these
dusty quarter decks, as they swayed and bumped afield.

Another waggon had shot its load, and was jolting out through the
rickyard gate, as we swung ourselves in, shouting, over its tail.

Edward was the first up, and, as I gained my feet, he clutched me in a
death-grapple. I was a privateersman, he proclaimed, and he the captain
of the British frigate Terpsichore, of--I forget the precise number
of guns. Edward always collared the best parts to himself; but I was
holding my own gallantly, when I suddenly discovered that the floor we
battled on was swarming with earwigs. Shrieking, I hurled free of him,
and rolled over the tail-board on to the stubble. Edward executed a
war-dance of triumph on the deck of the retreating galleon; but I cared
little for that. I knew HE knew that I wasn't afraid of him, but that
I was--and terribly--of earwigs, “those mortal bugs o' the field.” So
I let him disappear, shouting lustily for all hands to repel boarders,
while I strolled inland, down the village.

There was a touch of adventure in the expedition. This was not our own
village, but a foreign one, distant at least a mile. One felt that
sense of mingled distinction and insecurity which is familiar to
the traveller: distinction, in that folk turned the head to note you
curiously; insecurity, by reason of the ever-present possibility of
missiles on the part of the more juvenile inhabitants, a class eternally
conservative. Elated with isolation, I went even more nose-in-air than
usual: and “even so,” I mused, “might Mungo Park have threaded the
trackless African forest and...” Here I plumped against a soft, but
resisting body.

Recalled to my senses by the shock, I fell back in the attitude every
boy under these circumstances instinctively adopts--both elbows well up
over the ears. I found myself facing a tall elderly man, clean-shaven,
clad in well-worn black--a clergyman evidently; and I noted at once
a far-away look in his eyes, as if they were used to another plane of
vision, and could not instantly focus things terrestrial, being suddenly
recalled thereto. His figure was bent in apologetic protest: “I ask a
thousand pardons, sir,” he said; “I am really so very absent-minded. I
trust you will forgive me.”

Now most boys would have suspected chaff under this courtly style of
address. I take infinite credit to myself for recognising at once
the natural attitude of a man to whom his fellows were gentlemen all,
neither Jew nor Gentile, clean nor unclean. Of course, I took the blame
on myself; adding, that I was very absent-minded too,--which was indeed
the case.

“I perceive,” he said pleasantly, “that we have something in common. I,
an old man, dream dreams; you, a young one, see visions. Your lot is
the happier. And now--” his hand had been resting all this time on a
wicket-gate--“you are hot, it is easily seen; the day is advanced, Virgo
is the Zodiacal sign. Perhaps I may offer you some poor refreshment, if
your engagements will permit.”

My only engagement that afternoon was an arithmetic lesson, and I had
not intended to keep it in any case; so I passed in, while he held
the gate open politely, murmuring “Venit Hesperus ite, capellae: come,
little kid!” and then apologising abjectly for a familiarity which (he
said) was less his than the Roman poet's. A straight flagged walk led up
to the cool-looking old house, and my host, lingering in his progress at
this rose-tree and that, forgot all about me at least twice, waking up
and apologising humbly after each lapse. During these intervals I put
two and two together, and identified him as the Rector: a bachelor,
eccentric, learned exceedingly, round whom the crust of legend was
already beginning to form; to myself an object of special awe, in that
he was alleged to have written a real book. “Heaps o' books,” Martha,
my informant, said; but I knew the exact rate of discount applicable to
Martha's statements.

We passed eventually through a dark hall into a room which struck me
at once as the ideal I had dreamed but failed to find. None of your
feminine fripperies here! None of your chair-backs and tidies! This man,
it was seen, groaned under no aunts. Stout volumes in calf and vellum
lined three sides; books sprawled or hunched themselves on chairs and
tables; books diffused the pleasant odour of printers' ink and bindings;
topping all, a faint aroma of tobacco cheered and heartened exceedingly,
as under foreign skies the flap and rustle over the wayfarer's head
of the Union Jack--the old flag of emancipation! And in one corner,
book-piled like the rest of the furniture, stood a piano.

This I hailed with a squeal of delight. “Want to strum?” inquired my
friend, as if it was the most natural wish in the world--his eyes were
already straying towards another corner, where bits of writing-table
peeped out from under a sort of Alpine system of book and foolscap.

“O, but may I?” I asked in doubt. “At home I'm not allowed to--only
beastly exercises!”

“Well, you can strum here, at all events,” he replied; and murmuring
absently, Age, dic Latinum, barbite, carmen, he made his way,
mechanically guided as it seemed, to the irresistible writing-able. In
ten seconds he was out of sight and call. A great book open on his knee,
another propped up in front, a score or so disposed within easy reach,
he read and jotted with an absorption almost passionate. I might have
been in Boeotia, for any consciousness he had of me. So with a light
heart I turned to and strummed.

Those who painfully and with bleeding feet have scaled the crags of
mastery over musical instruments have yet their loss in this,--that the
wild joy of strumming has become a vanished sense. Their happiness comes
from the concord and the relative value of the notes they handle:
the pure, absolute quality and nature of each note in itself are only
appreciated by the strummer. For some notes have all the sea in them,
and some cathedral bells; others a woodland joyance and a smell of
greenery; in some fauns dance to the merry reed, and even the grave
centaurs peep out from their caves. Some bring moonlight, and some the
deep crimson of a rose's heart; some are blue, some red, and others will
tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And throughout
all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white men leap and
peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all the big rosewood
box hums as it were full of hiving bees.

Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend's eye
over the edge of a folio. “But as for these Germans,” he began abruptly,
as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, “the scholarship
is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception, the happy
intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!”

“They get nothing whatever from US,” I said decidedly: the word German
only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.

“You think not?” he rejoined, doubtfully, getting up and walking about
the room. “Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a
critic. They are qualities--in youth--as rare as they are pleasing. But
just look at Schrumpffius, for instance--how he struggles and wrestles
with a simple γἁρ in this very passage here!”

I peeped fearfully through the open door, half-dreading to see some
sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was
still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so.

“Precisely,” he cried, delighted. “To you, who possess the natural
scholar's faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at
all. But to this Schrumpffius--” But here, luckily for me, in came the
housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.

“Your tea is in the garden,” she said, as if she were correcting a
faulty emendation. “I've put some cakes and things for the little
gentleman; and you'd better drink it before it gets cold.”

He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over my
devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a moment's
break in his descant; and then, “You'd better drink it before it
gets cold,” she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a
deprecating look at me. “Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,” he
observed, feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.
I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him, I
concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the “cakes and things”
 with no misgivings.

After a most successful and most learned tea a something happened which,
small as I was, never quite shook itself out of my memory.

To us at parley in an arbour over the high road, there entered,
slouching into view, a dingy tramp, satellited by a frowsy woman and a
pariah dog; and, catching sight of us, he set up his professional whine;
and I looked at my friend with the heartiest compassion, for I knew
well from Martha--it was common talk--that at this time of day he was
certainly and surely penniless. Morn by morn he started forth with
pockets lined; and each returning evening found him with never a sou.
All this he proceeded to explain at length to the tramp, courteously
and even shamefacedly, as one who was in the wrong; and at last the
gentleman of the road, realising the hopelessness of his case, set to
and cursed him with gusto, vocabulary, and abandonment. He reviled
his eyes, his features, his limbs, his profession, his relatives and
surroundings; and then slouched off, still oozing malice and filth. We
watched the party to a turn in the road, where the woman, plainly weary,
came to a stop. Her lord, after some conventional expletives demanded of
him by his position, relieved her of her bundle, and caused her to hang
on his arm with a certain rough kindness of tone, and in action even a
dim approach to tenderness; and the dingy dog crept up for one lick at
her hand.

“See,” said my friend, bearing somewhat on my shoulder, “how this
strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the
unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning?
Barren acres, all! But only stoop--catch the light thwartwise--and all
is a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange
thing underrun and link together the whole world. Yet it is not the old
imperious god of the fatal bow--ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν--not that--nor even the placid
respectable στοργή--but something still unnamed, perhaps more
mysterious, more divine! Only one must stoop to see it, old fellow, one
must stoop!”

The dew was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards
down the road. Lonely spaces everywhere, above and around. Only Hesperus
hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn and remote; yet
infinitely heartening, somehow, in his valorous isolation.




SNOWBOUND

Twelfth-night had come and gone, and life next morning seemed a trifle
flat and purposeless. But yester-eve and the mummers were here! They had
come striding into the old kitchen, powdering the red brick floor with
snow from their barbaric bedizenments; and stamping, and crossing, and
declaiming, till all was whirl and riot and shout. Harold was frankly
afraid: unabashed, he buried himself in the cook's ample bosom. Edward
feigned a manly superiority to illusion, and greeted these awful
apparitions familiarly, as Dick and Harry and Joe. As for me, I was too
big to run, too rapt to resist the magic and surprise. Whence came
these outlanders, breaking in on us with song and ordered masque and
a terrible clashing of wooden swords? And after these, what strange
visitants might we not look for any quiet night, when the chestnuts
popped in the ashes, and the old ghost stories drew the awe-stricken
circle close? Old Merlin, perhaps, “all furred in black sheep-skins,
and a russet gown, with a bow and arrows, and bearing wild geese in his
hand!” Or stately Ogier the Dane, recalled from Faery, asking his way
to the land that once had need of him! Or even, on some white night,
the Snow-Queen herself, with a chime of sleigh-bells and the patter of
reindeers' feet, with sudden halt at the door flung wide, while aloft
the Northern Lights went shaking attendant spears among the quiet stars!

This morning, house-bound by the relentless, indefatigable snow, I was
feeling the reaction Edward, on the contrary, being violently stage
struck on this his first introduction to the real Drama, was striding up
and down the floor, proclaiming “Here be I, King Gearge the Third,” in a
strong Berkshire accent. Harold, accustomed, as the youngest, to lonely
antics and to sports that asked no sympathy, was absorbed in “clubmen”:
a performance consisting in a measured progress round the room
arm-in-arm with an imaginary companion of reverend years, with
occasional halts at imaginary clubs, where--imaginary steps being
leisurely ascended--imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal
was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and--regrettable to
say--imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven only knows how the
germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish
being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of
it. Meanwhile, Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched,
spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive of the innumerable
snow-flakes, wrapping our cheery little world in an uncanny uniform,
ghastly in line and hue.

Charlotte was sadly out of spirits. Having “countered” Miss Smedley at
breakfast, during some argument or other, by an apt quotation from
her favourite classic (the Fairy Book) she had been gently but firmly
informed that no such things as fairies ever really existed. “Do you
mean to say it's all lies?” asked Charlotte, bluntly. Miss Smedley
deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connection at
all. “These stories had their origin, my dear,” she explained, “in a
mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature. But though we
are now too well informed to fall into similar errors, there are still
many beautiful lessons to be learned from these myths--”

“But how can you learn anything,” persisted Charlotte, “from what
doesn't exist?” And she left the table defiant, howbeit depressed.

“Don't you mind HER,” I said, consolingly; “how can she know anything
about it? Why, she can't even throw a stone properly!”

“Edward says they're all rot, too,” replied Charlotte, doubtfully.

“Edward says everything's rot,” I explained, “now he thinks he's going
into the Army. If a thing's in a book it MUST be true, so that settles
it!”

Charlotte looked almost reassured. The room was quieter now, for Edward
had got the dragon down and was boring holes in him with a purring
sound Harold was ascending the steps of the Athenaeum with a jaunty
air--suggestive rather of the Junior Carlton. Outside, the tall
elm-tops were hardly to be seen through the feathery storm. “The sky's
a-falling,” quoted Charlotte, softly; “I must go and tell the king.”
 The quotation suggested a fairy story, and I offered to read to
her, reaching out for the book. But the Wee Folk were under a cloud;
sceptical hints had embittered the chalice. So I was fain to fetch
Arthur--second favourite with Charlotte for his dames riding errant, and
an easy first with us boys for his spear-splintering crash of tourney
and hurtle against hopeless odds. Here again, however, I proved
unfortunate,--what ill-luck made the book open at the sorrowful history
of Balin and Balan? “And he vanished anon,” I read: “and so he heard
an horne blow, as it had been the death of a beast. 'That blast,' said
Balin, 'is blowen for me, for I am the prize, and yet am I not dead.'”
 Charlotte began to cry: she knew the rest too well. I shut the book in
despair. Harold emerged from behind the arm-chair. He was sucking his
thumb (a thing which members of the Reform are seldom seen to do),
and he stared wide-eyed at his tear stained sister. Edward put off his
histrionics, and rushed up to her as the consoler--a new part for him.

“I know a jolly story,” he began. “Aunt Eliza told it me. It was when
she was somewhere over in that beastly abroad”--(he had once spent a
black month of misery at Dinan)--“and there was a fellow there who had
got two storks. And one stork died--it was the she-stork.” (“What did
it die of?” put in Harold.) “And the other stork was quite sorry, and
moped, and went on, and got very miserable. So they looked about and
found a duck, and introduced it to the stork. The duck was a drake, but
the stork didn't mind, and they loved each other and were as jolly
as could be. By and by another duck came along,--a real she-duck this
time,--and when the drake saw her he fell in love, and left the stork,
and went and proposed to the duck: for she was very beautiful. But the
poor stork who was left, he said nothing at all to anybody, but just
pined and pined and pined away, till one morning he was found quite
dead! But the ducks lived happily ever afterwards!”

This was Edward's idea of a jolly story! Down again went the corners of
poor Charlotte's mouth. Really Edward's stupid inability to see the real
point in anything was TOO annoying! It was always so. Years before, it
being necessary to prepare his youthful mind for a domestic event that
might lead to awkward questionings at a time when there was little
leisure to invent appropriate answers, it was delicately inquired of
him whether he would like to have a little brother, or perhaps a little
sister? He considered the matter carefully in all its bearings, and
finally declared for a Newfoundland pup. Any boy more “gleg at the
uptak” would have met his parents half-way, and eased their burden.
As it was, the matter had to be approached all over again from a fresh
standpoint. And now, while Charlotte turned away sniffingly, with a
hiccough that told of an overwrought soul, Edward, unconscious (like Sir
Isaac's Diamond) of the mischief he had done, wheeled round on Harold
with a shout.

“I want a live dragon,” he announced: “you've got to be my dragon!”

“Leave me go, will you?” squealed Harold, struggling stoutly. “I'm
playin' at something else. How can I be a dragon and belong to all the
clubs?”

“But wouldn't you like to be a nice scaly dragon, all green,” said
Edward, trying persuasion, “with a curly tail and red eyes, and
breathing real smoke and fire?”

Harold wavered an instant: Pall-Mall was still strong in him. The next
he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly
and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific
pants he emitted smokiest smoke and fiercest fire.

“Now I want a Princess,” cried Edward, clutching Charlotte ecstatically;
“and YOU can be the doctor, and heal me from the dragon's deadly wound.”

Of all professions I held the sacred art of healing in worst horror and
contempt. Cataclysmal memories of purge and draught crowded thick on me,
and with Charlotte--who courted no barren honours--I made a break for
the door. Edward did likewise, and the hostile forces clashed together
on the mat, and for a brief space things were mixed and chaotic and
Arthurian. The silvery sound of the luncheon-bell restored an instant
peace, even in the teeth of clenched antagonisms like ours. The Holy
Grail itself, “sliding athwart a sunbeam,” never so effectually stilled
a riot of warring passions into sweet and quiet accord.




WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT

Edward was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one
that had last passed under the dentist's hands, to be the capitalist
of the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff
obtained in ours,--half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the
molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately--in spite of Edward's
interested affectation of agony--had been shaky undisguised; but the
event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however,
Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement,
and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village
post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our
preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and
most self respecting of the rabbits had been let loose to grace the
feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest
plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her
affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for
bits of broken cork.

“Hurry up, can't you?” growled our host; “what are you girls always so
beastly particular for?”

“Martha says,” explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), “that
if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells
inside you, till you--”

“O bosh!” said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of
indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging
the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

“O, it's all very well to say bosh,” replied Harold, nettled; “but every
one knows it's true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and
they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of
his glass, and then he said, 'Poo, my goodness, that's corked!' And he
wouldn't touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny part
was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought out
into the passage, and there wasn't any cork in it at all! So I drank it
all off, and it was very good!”

“You'd better be careful, young man!” said his elder brother, regarding
him severely. “D' you remember that night when the Mummers were here,
and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the glasses
after they had gone away?”

“Ow! I did feel funny that night,” chuckled Harold. “Thought the house
was comin' down, it jumped about so; and Martha had to carry me up to
bed, 'cos the stairs was goin' all waggity!”

We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that
he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a
delinquency.

A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently
waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then
jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going for a
walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our Family to
meet with physical coercion any independence of action in individuals.

“She's off with those Vicarage girls again,” said Edward, regarding
Selina's long black legs twinkling down the path. “She goes out with
them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go
together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessed time!
I can't make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it's
gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!”

“P'raps they talk about birds'-eggs,” I suggested sleepily (the sun
was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); “and about ships, and
buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and
whether they'd sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they'll be
when they're men--at least, I mean there's lots of things to talk about,
if you WANT to talk.”

“Yes; but they don't talk about those sort of things at all,” persisted
Edward. “How CAN they? They don't KNOW anything; they can't DO
anything--except play the piano, and nobody would want to talk about
THAT; and they don't care about anything--anything sensible, I mean. So
what DO they talk about?”

“I asked Martha once,” put in Harold; “and she said, 'Never YOU mind;
young ladies has lots of things to talk about that young gentlemen can't
understand.'”

“I don't believe it,” Edward growled.

“Well, that's what she SAID, anyway,” rejoined Harold, indifferently.
The subject did not seem to him of first-class importance, and it was
hindering the circulation of the ginger-beer.

We heard the click of the front-gate. Through a gap in the hedge we
could see the party setting off down the road. Selina was in the middle:
a Vicarage girl had her by either arm; their heads were together, as
Edward had described; and the clack of their tongues came down the
breeze like the busy pipe of starlings on a bright March morning.

“What DO they talk about, Charlotte?” I inquired, wishing to pacify
Edward. “You go out with them sometimes.”

“I don't know,” said poor Charlotte, dolefully. “They make me walk
behind, 'cos they say I'm too little, and mustn't hear. And I DO want to
so,” she added.

“When any lady comes to see Aunt Eliza,” said Harold, “they both talk
at once all the time. And yet each of 'em seems to hear what the other
one's saying. I can't make out how they do it. Grown-up people are so
clever!”

“The Curate's the funniest man,” I remarked. “He's always saying things
that have no sense in them at all, and then laughing at them as if they
were jokes. Yesterday, when they asked him if he'd have some more tea
he said 'Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,' and
then sniggered all over. I didn't see anything funny in that. And then
somebody asked him about his button-hole and he said ''Tis but a little
faded flower,' and exploded again. I thought it very stupid.”

“O HIM,” said Edward contemptuously: “he can't help it, you know; it's a
sort of way he's got. But it's these girls I can't make out. If they've
anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody knows what it
is? And if they haven't--and we know they CAN'T have, naturally--why
don't they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here--HE doesn't want to
talk. He's got something better to do.” And Edward aimed a ginger-beer
cork at the unruffled beast, who never budged.

“O but rabbits DO talk,” interposed Harold. “I've watched them often
in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up and
down, just like Selina's and the Vicarage girls'. Only of course I can t
hear what they're saying.”

“Well, if they do,” said Edward, unwillingly, “I'll bet they don't talk
such rot as those girls do!”--which was ungenerous, as well as unfair;
for it had not yet transpired--nor has it to this day--WHAT Selina and
her friends talked about.




THE ARGONAUTS

The advent of strangers, of whatever sort, into our circle, had always
been a matter of grave dubiety and suspicion; indeed, it was generally
a signal for retreat into caves and fastnesses of the earth, into
unthreaded copses or remote outlying cowsheds, whence we were only to be
extricated by wily nursemaids, rendered familiar by experience with our
secret runs and refuges. It was not surprising therefore that the heroes
of classic legend, when first we made their acquaintance, failed to win
our entire sympathy at once. “Confidence,” says somebody, “is a plant of
slow growth;” and these stately dark-haired demi-gods, with names
hard to master and strange accoutrements, had to win a citadel already
strongly garrisoned with a more familiar soldiery. Their chill foreign
goddesses had no such direct appeal for us as the mocking malicious
fairies and witches of the North; we missed the pleasant alliance of
the animal--the fox who spread the bushiest of tails to convey us to
the enchanted castle, the frog in the well, the raven who croaked advice
from the tree; and--to Harold especially--it seemed entirely wrong that
the hero should ever be other than the youngest brother of three. This
belief, indeed, in the special fortune that ever awaited the youngest
brother, as such,--the “Borough-English” of Faery,--had been of baleful
effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that
called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on
his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn
himself seemed something of a parvenu. Even strangers, however, we
may develop into sworn comrades; and these gay swordsmen, after all,
were of the right stuff. Perseus, with his cap of darkness and his
wonderful sandals, was not long in winging his way to our hearts; Apollo
knocked at Admetus' gate in something of the right fairy fashion; Psyche
brought with her an orthodox palace of magic, as well as helpful birds
and friendly ants. Ulysses, with his captivating shifts and strategies,
broke down the final barrier, and hence forth the band was adopted and
admitted into our freemasonry.  I had been engaged in chasing Farmer
Larkin's calves--his special pride--round the field, just to show the
man we hadn't forgotten him, and was returning through the
kitchen-garden with a conscience at peace with all men, when I happened
upon Edward, grubbing for worms in the dung-heap. Edward put his worms
into his hat, and we strolled along together, discussing high matters of
state. As we reached the tool-shed, strange noises arrested our steps;
looking in, we perceived Harold, alone, rapt, absorbed, immersed in the
special game of the moment. He was squatting in an old pig-trough that
had been brought in to be tinkered; and as he rhapsodised, anon he waved
a shovel over his head, anon dug it into the ground with the action of
those who would urge Canadian canoes. Edward strode in upon him.

“What rot are you playing at now?” he demanded sternly.

Harold flushed up, but stuck to his pig-trough like a man.
“I'm Jason,” he replied, defiantly; “and this is the Argo. The other
fellows are here too, only you can't see them; and we're just going
through the Hellespont, so don't you come bothering.” And once more he
plied the wine-dark sea.

Edward kicked the pig-trough contemptuously.

“Pretty sort of Argo you've got!” said he.

Harold began to get annoyed. “I can't help it,” he replied. “It's the
best sort of Argo I can manage, and it's all right if you only pretend
enough; but YOU never could pretend one bit.”

Edward reflected. “Look here,” he said presently; “why shouldn't we get
hold of Farmer Larkin's boat, and go right away up the river in a real
Argo, and look for Medea, and the Golden Fleece, and everything? And
I'll tell you what, I don't mind your being Jason, as you thought of it
first.”

Harold tumbled out of the trough in the excess of his emotion. “But we
aren't allowed to go on the water by ourselves,” he cried.

“No,” said Edward, with fine scorn: “we aren't allowed; and Jason wasn't
allowed either, I daresay--but he WENT!”

Harold's protest had been merely conventional: he only wanted to be
convinced by sound argument. The next question was, How about the girls?
Selina was distinctly handy in a boat: the difficulty about her was,
that if she disapproved of the expedition--and, morally considered, it
was not exactly a Pilgrim's Progress--she might go and tell; she
having just reached that disagreeable age when one begins to develop a
conscience. Charlotte, for her part, had a habit of day-dreams, and was
as likely as not to fall overboard in one of her rapt musings. To be
sure, she would dissolve in tears when she found herself left out; but
even that was better than a watery tomb. In fine, the public voice--and
rightly, perhaps--was against the admission of the skirted animal: spite
the precedent of Atalanta, who was one of the original crew.

“And now,” said Edward, “who's to ask Farmer Larkin? I can't; last time
I saw him he said when he caught me again he'd smack my head. YOU'LL
have to.”

I hesitated, for good reasons. “You know those precious calves of his?”
 I began.

Edward understood at once. “All right,” he said; “then we won't ask him
at all. It doesn't much matter. He'd only be annoyed, and that would be
a pity. Now let's set off.”

We made our way down to the stream, and captured the farmer's boat
without let or hindrance, the enemy being engaged in the hayfields. This
“river,” so called, could never be discovered by us in any atlas; indeed
our Argo could hardly turn in it without risk of shipwreck. But to us 't
was Orinoco, and the cities of the world dotted its shores. We put the
Argo's head up stream, since that led away from the Larkin province;
Harold was faithfully permitted to be Jason, and we shared the rest of
the heroes among us. Then launching forth from Thessaly, we threaded
the Hellespont with shouts, breathlessly dodged the Clashing Rocks, and
coasted under the lee of the Siren-haunted isles. Lemnos was fringed
with meadow-sweet, dog-roses dotted the Mysian shore, and the cheery
call of the haymaking folk sounded along the coast of Thrace.

After some hour or two's seafaring, the prow of the Argo embedded itself
in the mud of a landing-place, plashy with the tread of cows and giving
on to a lane that led towards the smoke of human habitations. Edward
jumped ashore, alert for exploration, and strode off without waiting
to see if we followed; but I lingered behind, having caught sight of
a moss-grown water-gate hard by, leading into a garden that from
the brooding quiet lapping it round, appeared to portend magical
possibilities.

Indeed the very air within seemed stiller, as we circumspectly passed
through the gate; and Harold hung back shamefaced, as if we were
crossing the threshold of some private chamber, and ghosts of old days
were hustling past us. Flowers there were, everywhere; but they drooped
and sprawled in an overgrowth hinting at indifference; the scent of
heliotrope possessed the place, as if actually hung in solid festoons
from tall untrimmed hedge to hedge. No basket-chairs, shawls, or novels
dotted the lawn with colour; and on the garden-front of the house
behind, the blinds were mostly drawn. A grey old sun-dial dominated the
central sward, and we moved towards it instinctively, as the most human
thing visible. An antique motto ran round it, and with eyes and fingers
we struggled at the decipherment.

“TIME: TRYETH: TROTHE:” spelt out Harold at last. “I wonder what that
means?”

I could not enlighten him, nor meet his further questions as to the
inner mechanism of the thing, and where you wound it up.

I had seen these instruments before, of course, but had never fully
understood their manner of working.

We were still puzzling our heads over the contrivance, when I became
aware that Medea herself was moving down the path from the house.
Dark-haired, supple, of a figure lightly poised and swayed, but pale and
listless--I knew her at once, and having come out to find her, naturally
felt no surprise at all. But Harold, who was trying to climb on the top
of the sun-dial, having a cat-like fondness for the summit of things,
started and fell prone, barking his chin and filling the pleasance with
lamentation.

Medea skimmed the ground swallow-like, and in a moment was on her knees
comforting him,--wiping the dirt out of his chin with her own dainty
handkerchief,--and vocal with soft murmur of consolation.

“You needn't take on so about him,” I observed, politely. “He'll cry for
just one minute, and then he'll be all right.”

My estimate was justified. At the end of his regulation time Harold
stopped crying suddenly, like a clock that had struck its hour; and with
a serene and cheerful countenance wriggled out of Medea's embrace, and
ran for a stone to throw at an intrusive blackbird.

“O you boys!” cried Medea, throwing wide her arms with abandonment.
“Where have you dropped from? How dirty you are! I've been shut up here
for a thousand years, and all that time I've never seen any one under a
hundred and fifty! Let's play at something, at once!”

“Rounders is a good game,” I suggested. “Girls can play at rounders. And
we could serve up to the sun-dial here. But you want a bat and a ball,
and some more people.”

She struck her hands together tragically. “I haven't a bat,” she cried,
“or a ball, or more people, or anything sensible whatever. Never mind;
let's play at hide-and-seek in the kitchen garden. And we'll race there,
up to that walnut-tree; I haven't run for a century!”

She was so easy a victor, nevertheless, that I began to doubt, as I
panted behind, whether she had not exaggerated her age by a year or two.
She flung herself into hide-and-seek with all the gusto and abandonment
of the true artist, and as she flitted away and reappeared, flushed and
laughing divinely, the pale witch-maiden seemed to fall away from her,
and she moved rather as that other girl I had read about, snatched from
fields of daffodil to reign in shadow below, yet permitted once again to
visit earth, and light, and the frank, caressing air.

Tired at last, we strolled back to the old sundial, and Harold, who
never relinquished a problem unsolved, began afresh, rubbing his finger
along the faint incisions, “Time tryeth trothe. Please, I want to know
what that means.”

Medea's face drooped low over the sun-dial, till it was almost hidden in
her fingers. “That's what I'm here for,” she said presently, in quite a
changed, low voice. “They shut me up here--they think I'll forget--but
I never will--never, never! And he, too--but I don't know--it is so
long--I don't know!”

Her face was quite hidden now. There was silence again in the old
garden. I felt clumsily helpless and awkward; beyond a vague idea of
kicking Harold, nothing remedial seemed to suggest itself.

None of us had noticed the approach of another she-creature--one of the
angular and rigid class--how different from our dear comrade! The years
Medea had claimed might well have belonged to her; she wore mittens,
too--a trick I detested in woman. “Lucy!” she said, sharply, in a tone
with AUNT writ large over it; and Medea started up guiltily.

“You've been crying,” said the newcomer, grimly regarding her through
spectacles. “And pray who are these exceedingly dirty little boys?”

“Friends of mine, aunt,” said Medea, promptly, with forced cheerfulness.
“I--I've known them a long time. I asked them to come.”

The aunt sniffed suspiciously. “You must come indoors, dear,” she said,
“and lie down. The sun will give you a headache. And you little boys had
better run away home to your tea. Remember, you should not come to pay
visits without your nursemaid.”

Harold had been tugging nervously at my jacket for some time, and I only
waited till Medea turned and kissed a white hand to us as she was
led away. Then I ran. We gained the boat in safety; and “What an old
dragon!” said Harold.

“Wasn't she a beast!” I replied. “Fancy the sun giving any one a
headache! But Medea was a real brick. Couldn't we carry her off?”

“We could if Edward was here,” said Harold, confidently.

The question was, What had become of that defaulting hero? We were
not left long in doubt. First, there came down the lane the shrill and
wrathful clamour of a female tongue, then Edward, running his best, and
then an excited woman hard on his heel. Edward tumbled into the bottom
of the boat, gasping, “Shove her off!” And shove her off we did,
mightily, while the dame abused us from the bank in the self same
accents in which Alfred hurled defiance at the marauding Dane.

“That was just like a bit out of Westward Ho!” I remarked approvingly,
as we sculled down the stream. “But what had you been doing to her?”

“Hadn't been doing anything,” panted Edward, still breathless. “I went
up into the village and explored, and it was a very nice one, and the
people were very polite. And there was a blacksmith's forge there, and
they were shoeing horses, and the hoofs fizzled and smoked, and smelt so
jolly! I stayed there quite a long time. Then I got thirsty, so I asked
that old woman for some water, and while she was getting it her cat came
out of the cottage, and looked at me in a nasty sort of way, and
said something I didn't like. So I went up to it just to--to teach it
manners, and somehow or other, next minute it was up an apple-tree,
spitting, and I was running down the lane with that old thing after me.”

Edward was so full of his personal injuries that there was no
interesting him in Medea at all. Moreover, the evening was closing in,
and it was evident that this cutting-out expedition must be kept for
another day. As we neared home, it gradually occurred to us that perhaps
the greatest danger was yet to come; for the farmer must have missed
his boat ere now, and would probably be lying in wait for us near the
landing-place. There was no other spot admitting of debarcation on
the home side; if we got out on the other, and made for the bridge,
we should certainly be seen and cut off. Then it was that I blessed my
stars that our elder brother was with us that day,--he might be little
good at pretending, but in grappling with the stern facts of life he
had no equal. Enjoining silence, he waited till we were but a little
way from the fated landing-place, and then brought us in to the
opposite bank. We scrambled out noiselessly, and--the gathering darkness
favouring us--crouched behind a willow, while Edward pushed off the
empty boat with his foot. The old Argo, borne down by the gentle
current, slid and grazed along the rushy bank; and when she came
opposite the suspected ambush, a stream of imprecation told us that
our precaution had not been wasted. We wondered, as we listened, where
Farmer Larkin, who was bucolically bred and reared, had acquired such
range and wealth of vocabulary. Fully realising at last that his boat
was derelict, abandoned, at the mercy of wind and wave,--as well as out
of his reach,--he strode away to the bridge, about a quarter of a mile
further down; and as soon as we heard his boots clumping on the planks,
we nipped out, recovered the craft, pulled across, and made the faithful
vessel fast to her proper moorings. Edward was anxious to wait and
exchange courtesies and compliments with the disappointed farmer,
when he should confront us on the opposite bank; but wiser counsels
prevailed. It was possible that the piracy was not yet laid at our
particular door: Ulysses, I reminded him, had reason to regret a similar
act of bravado, and--were he here--would certainly advise a timely
retreat. Edward held but a low opinion of me as a counsellor; but he had
a very solid respect for Ulysses.




THE ROMAN ROAD

ALL the roads of our neighbourhood were cheerful and friendly, having
each of them pleasant qualities of their own; but this one seemed
different from the others in its masterful suggestion of a serious
purpose, speeding you along with a strange uplifting of the heart. The
others tempted chiefly with their treasures of hedge and ditch; the rapt
surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a field-mouse,
splash of a frog; while cool noses of brother-beasts were pushed at you
through gate or gap. A loiterer you had need to be, did you choose one
of them,--so many were the tiny hands thrust out to detain you, from
this side and that. But this other was of a sterner sort, and even in
its shedding off of bank and hedgerow as it marched straight and full
for the open downs, it seemed to declare its contempt for adventitious
trappings to catch the shallow-pated. When the sense of injustice or
disappointment was heavy on me, and things were very black within, as
on this particular day, the road of character was my choice for that
solitary ramble, when I turned my back for an afternoon on a world that
had unaccountably declared itself against me.

“The Knights' Road,” we children had named it, from a sort of feeling
that, if from any quarter at all, it would be down this track we
might some day see Lancelot and his peers come pacing on their great
war-horses,--supposing that any of the stout band still survived, in
nooks and unexplored places. Grown-up people sometimes spoke of it as
the “Pilgrims' Way”; but I didn't know much about pilgrims,--except
Walter in the Horselberg story. Him I sometimes saw, breaking with
haggard eyes out of yonder copse, and calling to the pilgrims as they
hurried along on their desperate march to the Holy City, where peace and
pardon were awaiting them. “All roads lead to Rome,” I had once heard
somebody say; and I had taken the remark very seriously, of course,
and puzzled over it many days. There must have been some mistake, I
concluded at last; but of one road at least I intuitively felt it to
be true. And my belief was clinched by something that fell from Miss
Smedley during a history lesson, about a strange road that ran right
down the middle of England till it reached the coast, and then began
again in France, just opposite, and so on undeviating, through city
and vineyard, right from the misty Highlands to the Eternal City.
Uncorroborated, any statement of Miss Smedley's usually fell on
incredulous ears; but here, with the road itself in evidence, she
seemed, once, in a way, to have strayed into truth.

Rome! It was fascinating to think that it lay at the other end of this
white ribbon that rolled itself off from my feet over the distant downs.
I was not quite so uninstructed as to imagine l could reach it
that afternoon; but some day, I thought, if things went on being as
unpleasant as they were now,--some day, when Aunt Eliza had gone on a
visit,--we would see.

I tried to imagine what it would be like when I got there. The Coliseum
I knew, of course, from a woodcut in the history-book: so to begin with
I plumped that down in the middle. The rest had to be patched up from
the little grey market-town where twice a year we went to have our hair
cut; hence, in the result, Vespasian's amphitheatre was approached
by muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the Blue Boar, with
Somebody's Entire along their front, and “Commercial Room” on their
windows; the doctor's house, of substantial red-brick; and the facade
of the New Wesleyan Chapel, which we thought very fine, were the chief
architectural ornaments: while the Roman populace pottered about in
smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of Roman calves and inviting
each other to beer in musical Wessex. From Rome I drifted on to other
cities, dimly heard of--Damascus, Brighton (Aunt Eliza's ideal), Athens,
and Glasgow, whose glories the gardener sang; but there was a certain
sameness in my conception of all of them: that Wesleyan chapel would
keep cropping up everywhere. It was easier to go a-building among
those dream-cities where no limitations were imposed, and one was sole
architect, with a free hand. Down a delectable street of cloud-built
palaces I was mentally pacing, when I happened upon the Artist.

He was seated at work by the roadside, at a point whence the cool large
spaces of the downs, juniper-studded, swept grandly westwards. His
attributes proclaimed him of the artist tribe: besides, he wore
knickerbockers like myself,--a garb confined, I was aware, to boys and
artists. I knew I was not to bother him with questions, nor look over
his shoulder and breathe in his ear--they didn't like it, this
genus irritabile; but there was nothing about staring in my code of
instructions, the point having somehow been overlooked: so, squatting
down on the grass, I devoted myself to a passionate absorbing of every
detail. At the end of five minutes there was not a button on him that I
could not have passed an examination in; and the wearer himself of that
homespun suit was probably less familiar with its pattern and texture
than I was. Once he looked up, nodded, half held out his tobacco
pouch,--mechanically, as it were,--then, returning it to his pocket,
resumed his work, and I my mental photography.

After another five minutes or so had passed he remarked, without looking
my way: “Fine afternoon we're having: going far to-day?”

“No, I'm not going any farther than this,” I replied; “I WAS thinking of
going on to Rome but I've put it off.”

“Pleasant place, Rome,” he murmured; “you'll like it.” It was some
minutes later that he added: “But I wouldn't go just now, if I were
you,--too jolly hot.”

“YOU haven't been to Rome, have you?” I inquired.

“Rather,” he replied, briefly; “I live there.”

This was too much, and my jaw dropped as I struggled to grasp the fact
that I was sitting there talking to a fellow who lived in Rome. Speech
was out of the question: besides, I had other things to do. Ten solid
minutes had I already spent in an examination of him as a mere stranger
and artist; and now the whole thing had to be done over again, from the
changed point of view. So I began afresh, at the crown of his soft
hat, and worked down to his solid British shoes, this time investing
everything with the new Roman halo; and at last I managed to get out:
“But you don't really live there, do you?” never doubting the fact, but
wanting to hear it repeated.

“Well,” he said, good-naturedly overlooking the slight rudeness of my
query, “I live there as much as l live anywhere,--about half the year
sometimes. I've got a sort of a shanty there. You must come and see it
some day.”

“But do you live anywhere else as well?” I went on, feeling the
forbidden tide of questions surging up within me.

“O yes, all over the place,” was his vague reply. “And I've got a
diggings somewhere off Piccadilly.”

“Where's that?” I inquired.

“Where's what?” said he. “Oh, Piccadilly! It's in London.”

“Have you a large garden?” I asked; “and how many pigs have you got?”

“I've no garden at all,” he replied, sadly, “and they don't allow me to
keep pigs, though I'd like to, awfully. It's very hard.”

“But what do you do all day, then,” I cried, “and where do you go and
play, without any garden, or pigs, or things?”

“When I want to play,” he said, gravely, “I have to go and play in the
street; but it's poor fun, I grant you. There's a goat, though, not far
off, and sometimes I talk to him when I'm feeling lonely; but he's very
proud.”

“Goats ARE proud,” I admitted. “There's one lives near here, and if you
say anything to him at all, he hits you in the wind with his head. You
know what it feels like when a fellow hits you in the wind?”

“I do, well,” he replied, in a tone of proper melancholy, and painted
on.

“And have you been to any other places,” I began again, presently,
“besides Rome and Piccy-what's-his-name?”

“Heaps,” he said. “I'm a sort of Ulysses--seen men and cities, you know.
In fact, about the only place I never got to was the Fortunate Island.”

I began to like this man. He answered your questions briefly and to the
point, and never tried to be funny. I felt I could be confidential with
him.

“Wouldn't you like,” I inquired, “to find a city without any people in
it at all?”

He looked puzzled. “I'm afraid I don't quite understand,” said he.

“I mean,” I went on eagerly, “a city where you walk in at the gates, and
the shops are all full of beautiful things, and the houses furnished as
grand as can be, and there isn't anybody there whatever! And you go into
the shops, and take anything you want--chocolates and magic lanterns and
injirubber balls--and there's nothing to pay; and you choose your own
house and live there and do just as you like, and never go to bed unless
you want to!”

The artist laid down his brush. “That WOULD be a nice city,” he said.
“Better than Rome. You can't do that sort of thing in Rome,--or in
Piccadilly either. But I fear it's one of the places I've never been
to.”

“And you'd ask your friends,” I went on, warming to my subject,--“only
those you really like, of course,--and they'd each have a house to
themselves,--there'd be lots of houses,--and no relations at all, unless
they promised they'd be pleasant, and if they weren't they'd have to
go.”

“So you wouldn't have any relations?” said the artist. “Well, perhaps
you're right. We have tastes in common, I see.”

“I'd have Harold,” I said, reflectively, “and Charlotte. They'd like
it awfully. The others are getting too old. Oh, and Martha--I'd have
Martha, to cook and wash up and do things. You'd like Martha. She's ever
so much nicer than Aunt Eliza. She's my idea of a real lady.”

“Then I'm sure I should like her,” he replied, heartily, “and when I
come to--what do you call this city of yours? Nephelo--something, did
you say?”

“I--I don't know,” I replied, timidly. “I'm afraid it hasn't got a
name--yet.”

The artist gazed out over the downs. “'The poet says, dear city of
Cecrops;'” he said, softly, to himself, “'and wilt not thou say, dear
city of Zeus?' That's from Marcus Aurelius,” he went on, turning again
to his work. “You don't know him, I suppose; you will some day.”

“Who's he?” I inquired.

“Oh, just another fellow who lived in Rome,” he replied, dabbing away.

“O dear!” I cried, disconsolately. “What a lot of people seem to live
at Rome, and I've never even been there! But I think I'd like MY city
best.”

“And so would I,” he replied with unction. “But Marcus Aurelius
wouldn't, you know.”

“Then we won't invite him,” I said, “will we?”

“_I_ won't if you won't,” said he. And that point being settled, we were
silent for a while.

“Do you know,” he said, presently, “I've met one or two fellows from
time to time who have been to a city like yours,--perhaps it was the
same one. They won't talk much about it--only broken hints, now and
then; but they've been there sure enough. They don't seem to care about
anything in particular--and every thing's the same to them, rough or
smooth; and sooner or later they slip off and disappear; and you never
see them again. Gone back, I suppose.”

“Of course,” said I. “Don't see what they ever came away for; _I_
wouldn't,--to be told you've broken things when you haven't, and stopped
having tea with the servants in the kitchen, and not allowed to have a
dog to sleep with you. But _I've_ known people, too, who've gone there.”

The artist stared, but without incivility.

“Well, there's Lancelot,” I went on. “The book says he died, but it
never seemed to read right, somehow. He just went away, like Arthur. And
Crusoe, when he got tired of wearing clothes and being respectable. And
all the nice men in the stones who don't marry the Princess, 'cos only
one man ever gets married in a book, you know. They'll be there!”

“And the men who never come off,” he said, “who try like the rest, but
get knocked out, or somehow miss,--or break down or get bowled over in
the melee,--and get no Princess, nor even a second-class kingdom,--some
of them'll be there, I hope?”

“Yes, if you like,” I replied, not quite understanding him; “if they're
friends of yours, we'll ask 'em, of course.”

“What a time we shall have!” said the artist, reflectively; “and how
shocked old Marcus Aurelius will be!”

The shadows had lengthened uncannily, a tide of golden haze was flooding
the grey-green surface of the downs, and the artist began to put his
traps together, preparatory to a move. I felt very low; we would have
to part, it seemed, just as we were getting on so well together. Then he
stood up, and he was very straight and tall, and the sunset was in his
hair and beard as he stood there, high over me. He took my hand like an
equal. “I've enjoyed our conversation very much,” he said. “That was an
interesting subject you started, and we haven't half exhausted it. We
shall meet again, I hope.”

“Of course we shall,” I replied, surprised that there should be any
doubt about it.

“In Rome, perhaps?” said he.

“Yes, in Rome,” I answered, “or Piccy-the-other-place, or somewhere.”

“Or else,” said he, “in that other city,--when we've found the way
there. And I'll look out for you, and you'll sing out as soon as you see
me. And we'll go down the street arm-in-arm, and into all the shops, and
then I'll choose my house, and you'll choose your house, and we'll live
there like princes and good fellows.”

“Oh, but you'll stay in my house, won't you?” I cried; “wouldn't ask
everybody; but I'll ask YOU.”

He affected to consider a moment; then “Right!” he said: “I believe you
mean it, and I WILL come and stay with you. I won't go to anybody else,
if they ask me ever so much. And I'll stay quite a long time, too, and I
won't be any trouble.”

Upon this compact we parted, and I went down-heartedly from the man who
understood me, back to the house where I never could do anything right.
How was it that everything seemed natural and sensible to him, which
these uncles, vicars, and other grown-up men took for the merest
tomfoolery? Well, he would explain this, and many another thing, when we
met again. The Knights' Road! How it always brought consolation! Was he
possibly one of those vanished knights I had been looking for so long?
Perhaps he would be in armour next time,--why not? He would look well in
armour, I thought. And I would take care to get there first, and see the
sunlight flash and play on his helmet and shield, as he rode up the High
Street of the Golden City.

Meantime, there only remained the finding it,--an easy matter.




THE SECRET DRAWER

IT must surely have served as a boudoir for the ladies of old time,
this little used, rarely entered chamber where the neglected old bureau
stood. There was something very feminine in the faint hues of its faded
brocades, in the rose and blue of such bits of china as yet remained,
and in the delicate old-world fragrance of pot-pourri from the great
bowl--blue and white, with funny holes in its cover--that stood on
the bureau's flat top. Modern aunts disdained this out-of-the-way,
back-water, upstairs room, preferring to do their accounts and grapple
with their correspondence in some central position more in the whirl of
things, whence one eye could be kept on the carriage drive, while the
other was alert for malingering servants and marauding children. Those
aunts of a former generation--I sometimes felt--would have suited our
habits better. But even by us children, to whom few places were private
or reserved, the room was visited but rarely. To be sure, there was
nothing particular in it that we coveted or required,--only a few
spindle-legged gilt-backed chairs; an old harp, on which, so the
legend ran, Aunt Eliza herself used once to play, in years remote,
unchronicled; a corner-cupboard with a few pieces of china; and the old
bureau. But one other thing the room possessed, peculiar to itself; a
certain sense of privacy,--a power of making the intruder feel that he
WAS intruding,--perhaps even a faculty of hinting that some one might
have been sitting on those chairs, writing at the bureau, or fingering
the china, just a second before one entered.

No such violent word as “haunted” could possibly apply to this pleasant
old-fashioned chamber, which indeed we all rather liked; but there was
no doubt it was reserved and stand-offish, keeping itself to itself.

Uncle Thomas was the first to draw my attention to the possibilities of
the old bureau. He was pottering about the house one afternoon, having
ordered me to keep at his heels for company,--he was a man who hated to
be left one minute alone,--when his eye fell on it. “H'm! Sheraton!” he
remarked. (He had a smattering of most things, this uncle, especially
the vocabularies.) Then he let down the flap, and examined the empty
pigeon-holes and dusty panelling. “Fine bit of inlay,” he went on:
“good work, all of it. I know the sort. There's a secret drawer in there
somewhere.” Then, as I breathlessly drew near, he suddenly exclaimed:
“By Jove, I do want to smoke!” and wheeling round he abruptly fled for
the garden, leaving me with the cup dashed from my lips. What a strange
thing, I mused, was this smoking, that takes a man suddenly, be he in
the court, the camp, or the grove, grips him like an Afreet, and whirls
him off to do its imperious behests! Would it be even so with myself, I
wondered, in those unknown grown-up years to come?

But I had no time to waste in vain speculations. My whole being was
still vibrating to those magic syllables, “secret drawer;” and that
particular chord had been touched that never fails to thrill responsive
to such words as CAVE, TRAP-DOOR, SLIDING-PANEL, BULLION, INGOTS, or
SPANISH DOLLARS. For, besides its own special bliss, who ever heard of
a secret drawer with nothing in it? And oh, I did want money so badly!
I mentally ran over the list of demands which were pressing me the most
imperiously.

First, there was the pipe I wanted to give George Jannaway. George, who
was Martha's young man, was a shepherd, and a great ally of mine; and
the last fair he was at, when he bought his sweetheart fairings, as a
right-minded shepherd should, he had purchased a lovely snake expressly
for me; one of the wooden sort, with joints, waggling deliciously in the
hand; with yellow spots on a green ground, sticky and strong-smelling,
as a fresh-painted snake ought to be; and with a red-flannel tongue,
pasted cunningly into its jaws. I loved it much, and took it to bed with
me every night, till what time its spinal cord was loosed and it fell
apart, and went the way of all mortal joys. I thought it so nice of
George to think of me at the fair, and that's why I wanted to give him
a pipe. When the young year was chill and lambing-time was on, George
inhabited a little wooden house on wheels, far out on the wintry downs,
and saw no faces but such as were sheepish and woolly and mute; ant when
he and Martha were married, she was going to carry his dinner out to him
every day, two miles; and after it, perhaps he would smoke my pipe. It
seemed an idyllic sort of existence, for both the parties concerned;
but a pipe of quality, a pipe fitted to be part of a life such as
this, could not be procured (so Martha informed me) for a less sum than
eighteen pence. And meantime--!

Then there was the fourpence I owed Edward; not that he was bothering me
for it, but I knew he was in need of it himself, to pay back Selina, who
wanted it to make up a sum of two shillings, to buy Harold an ironclad
for his approaching birthday,--H. M. S. Majestic, now lying uselessly
careened in the toyshop window, just when her country had such sore need
of her.

And then there was that boy in the village who had caught a young
squirrel, and I had never yet possessed one, and he wanted a shilling
for it, but I knew that for ninepence in cash--but what was the good of
these sorry, threadbare reflections? I had wants enough to exhaust any
possible find of bullion, even if it amounted to half a sovereign.
My only hope now lay in the magic drawer, and here I was standing and
letting the precious minutes slip by. Whether “findings” of this sort
could, morally speaking, be considered “keepings,” was a point that did
not occur to me.

The room was very still as I approached the bureau,--possessed, it
seemed to be, by a sort of hush of expectation. The faint odour of
orris-root that floated forth as I let down the flap, seemed to identify
itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood, till hue and scent
were of one quality and interchangeable.

Even so, ere this, the pot-pourri had mixed itself with the tints of the
old brocade, and brocade and pot-pourri had long been one.

With expectant fingers I explored the empty pigeon-holes and sounded the
depths of the softly-sliding drawers. No books that I knew of gave any
general recipe for a quest like this; but the glory, should I succeed
unaided, would be all the greater.

To him who is destined to arrive, the fates never fail to afford, on the
way, their small encouragements; in less than two minutes, I had come
across a rusty button-hook. This was truly magnificent. In the nursery
there existed, indeed, a general button-hook, common to either sex;
but none of us possessed a private and special button-hook, to lend or
refuse as suited the high humour of the moment. I pocketed the treasure
carefully and proceeded. At the back of another drawer, three old
foreign stamps told me I was surely on the highroad to fortune.

Following on these bracing incentives, came a dull blank period of
unrewarded search. In vain I removed all the drawers and felt over every
inch of the smooth surfaces, from front to back. Never a knob, spring
or projection met the thrilling finger-tips; unyielding the old bureau
stood, stoutly guarding its secret, if secret it really had. I began
to grow weary and disheartened. This was not the first time that Uncle
Thomas had proved shallow, uninformed, a guide into blind alleys where
the echoes mocked you. Was it any good persisting longer? Was anything
any good whatever? In my mind I began to review past disappointments,
and life seemed one long record of failure and of non-arrival.
Disillusioned and depressed, I left my work and went to the window.
The light was ebbing from the room, and outside seemed to be collecting
itself on the horizon for its concentrated effort of sunset. Far down
the garden, Uncle Thomas was holding Edward in the air reversed, and
smacking him. Edward, gurgling hysterically, was striking blind fists in
the direction where he judged his uncle's stomach should rightly be; the
contents of his pockets--a motley show--were strewing the lawn. Somehow,
though I had been put through a similar performance an hour or two ago,
myself, it all seemed very far away and cut off from me.

Westwards the clouds were massing themselves in a low violet bank; below
them, to north and south, as far round as eye could reach, a narrow
streak of gold ran out and stretched away, straight along the horizon.
Somewhere very far off, a horn was being blown, clear and thin; it
sounded like the golden streak grown audible, while the gold seemed
the visible sound. It pricked my ebbing courage, this blended strain of
music and colour, and I turned for a last effort; and Fortune thereupon,
as if half-ashamed of the unworthy game she had been playing with me,
relented, opening her clenched fist. Hardly had I put my hand once more
to the obdurate wood, when with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob--as
it were--of relief, the secret drawer sprang open.

I drew it out and carried it to the window, to examine it in the failing
light. Too hopeless had I gradually grown, in my dispiriting search, to
expect very much; and yet at a glance I saw that my basket of glass lay
in fragments at my feet. No ingots or dollars were here, to crown me the
little Monte Cristo of a week. Outside, the distant horn had ceased its
gnat-song, the gold was paling to primrose, and everything was lonely
and still. Within, my confident little castles were tumbling down like
card-houses, leaving me stripped of estate, both real and personal, and
dominated by the depressing reaction.

And yet,--as I looked again at the small collection that lay within
that drawer of disillusions, some warmth crept back to my heart as I
recognised that a kindred spirit to my own had been at the making of it.
Two tarnished gilt buttons,--naval, apparently,--a portrait of a monarch
unknown to me, cut from some antique print and deftly coloured by hand
in just my own bold style of brush-work,--some foreign copper coins,
thicker and clumsier of make than those I hoarded myself,--and a list of
birds' eggs, with names of the places where they had been found. Also, a
ferret's muzzle, and a twist of tarry string, still faintly aromatic. It
was a real boy's hoard, then, that I had happened upon. He too had found
out the secret drawer, this happy starred young person; and here he had
stowed away his treasures, one by one, and had cherished them secretly
awhile; and then--what? Well, one would never know now the reason why
these priceless possessions still lay here unreclaimed; but across the
void stretch of years I seemed to touch hands a moment with my little
comrade of seasons long since dead.

I restored the drawer, with its contents, to the trusty bureau, and
heard the spring click with a certain satisfaction. Some other boy,
perhaps, would some day release that spring again. I trusted he would be
equally appreciative. As I opened the door to go, I could hear from the
nursery at the end of the passage shouts and yells, telling that the
hunt was up. Bears, apparently, or bandits, were on the evening bill of
fare, judging by the character of the noises. In another minute I would
be in the thick of it, in all the warmth and light and laughter. And
yet--what a long way off it all seemed, both in space and time, to me
yet lingering on the threshold of that old-world chamber!




“EXIT TYRANNUS”

The eventful day had arrived at last, the day which, when first named,
had seemed--like all golden dates that promise anything definite--so
immeasurably remote. When it was first announced, a fortnight before,
that Miss Smedley was really going, the resultant ecstasies had occupied
a full week, during which we blindly revelled in the contemplation and
discussion of her past tyrannies, crimes, malignities; in recalling to
each other this or that insult, dishonour, or physical assault, sullenly
endured at a time when deliverance was not even a small star on the
horizon; and in mapping out the golden days to come, with special new
troubles of their own, no doubt, since this is but a work-a-day world,
but at least free from one familiar scourge. The time that remained had
been taken up by the planning of practical expressions of the popular
sentiment. Under Edward's masterly direction, arrangements had been made
for a flag to be run up over the hen-house at the very moment when the
fly, with Miss Smedley's boxes on top and the grim oppressor herself
inside, began to move off down the drive. Three brass cannons, set on
the brow of the sunk-fence, were to proclaim our deathless sentiments
in the ears of the retreating foe: the dogs were to wear ribbons,
and later--but this depended on our powers of evasiveness and
dissimulation--there might be a small bonfire, with a cracker or two, if
the public funds could bear the unwonted strain.

I was awakened by Harold digging me in the ribs, and “She's going
to-day!” was the morning hymn that scattered the clouds of sleep.

Strange to say, it was with no corresponding jubilation of spirits
that I slowly realised the momentous fact. Indeed, as I dressed, a dull
disagreeable feeling that I could not define grew within me--something
like a physical bruise. Harold was evidently feeling it too, for after
repeating “She's going to-day!” in a tone more befitting the Litany, he
looked hard in my face for direction as to how the situation was to be
taken. But I crossly bade him look sharp and say his prayers and not
bother me. What could this gloom portend, that on a day of days like the
present seemed to hang my heavens with black?

Down at last and out in the sun, we found Edward before us, swinging on
a gate, and chanting a farm-yard ditty in which all the beasts appear
in due order, jargoning in their several tongues, and every verse begins
with the couplet--

            “Now, my lads, come with me,
             Out in the morning early!”

The fateful exodus of the day had evidently slipped his memory entirely.
I touched him on the shoulder. “She's going to-day!” I said. Edward's
carol subsided like a water-tap turned off. “So she is!” he replied,
and got down at once off the gate: and we returned to the house without
another word.

At breakfast Miss Smedley behaved in a most mean and uncalled-for
manner. The right divine of governesses to govern wrong includes no
right to cry. In thus usurping the prerogative of their victims, they
ignore the rules of the ring, and hit below the belt. Charlotte was
crying, of course; but that counted for nothing. Charlotte even cried
when the pigs' noses were ringed in due season; thereby evoking the
cheery contempt of the operators, who asserted they liked it, and
doubtless knew. But when the cloud-compeller, her bolts laid aside,
resorted to tears, mutinous humanity had a right to feel aggrieved, and
placed in a false and difficult position. What would the Romans have
done, supposing Hannibal had cried? History has not even considered the
possibility. Rules and precedents should be strictly observed on both
sides; when they are violated, the other party is justified in feeling
injured.

There were no lessons that morning, naturally--another grievance!

The fitness of things required that we should have struggled to the last
in a confused medley of moods and tenses, and parted for ever, flushed
with hatred, over the dismembered corpse of the multiplication table.
But this thing was not to be; and I was free to stroll by myself
through the garden, and combat, as best I might, this growing feeling of
depression. It was a wrong system altogether, I thought, this going of
people one had got used to. Things ought always to continue as they had
been. Change there must be, of course; pigs, for instance, came and went
with disturbing frequency--

        “Fired their ringing shot and passed,
         Hotly charged and sank at last,”--

but Nature had ordered it so, and in requital had provided for rapid
successors. Did you come to love a pig, and he was taken from you, grief
was quickly assuaged in the delight of selection from the new litter.
But now, when it was no question of a peerless pig, but only of a
governess, Nature seemed helpless, and the future held no litter of
oblivion. Things might be better, or they might be worse, but they would
never be the same; and the innate conservatism of youth asks neither
poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change.

Edward slouched up alongside of me presently, with a hang-dog look on
him, as if he had been caught stealing jam. “What a lark it'll be when
she's really gone!” he observed, with a swagger obviously assumed.

“Grand fun!” I replied, dolorously; and conversation flagged.

We reached the hen-house, and contemplated the banner of freedom lying
ready to flaunt the breezes at the supreme moment.

“Shall you run it up,” I asked, “when the fly starts, or--or wait a
little till it's out of sight?”

Edward gazed around him dubiously. “We're going to have some rain, I
think,” he said; “and--and it's a new flag. It would be a pity to spoil
it. P'raps I won't run it up at all.”

Harold came round the corner like a bison pursued by Indians. “I've
polished up the cannons,” he cried, “and they look grand! Mayn't I load
'em now?”

“You leave 'em alone,” said Edward, severely, “or you'll be blowing
yourself up” (consideration for others was not usually Edward's strong
point). “Don't touch the gunpowder till you're told, or you'll get your
head smacked.”

Harold fell behind, limp, squashed, obedient. “She wants me to write to
her,” he began, presently. “Says she doesn't mind the spelling, it I'll
only write. Fancy her saying that!”

“Oh, shut up, will you?” said Edward, savagely; and once more we were
silent, with only our thoughts for sorry company.

“Let's go off to the copse,” I suggested timidly, feeling that something
had to be done to relieve the tension, “and cut more new bows and
arrows.”

“She gave me a knife my last birthday,” said Edward, moodily, never
budging. “It wasn't much of a knife--but I wish I hadn't lost it.”

“When my legs used to ache,” I said, “she sat up half the night, rubbing
stuff on them. I forgot all about that till this morning.”

“There's the fly!” cried Harold suddenly. “I can hear it scrunching on
the gravel.”

Then for the first time we turned and stared one another in the face.

*****

The fly and its contents had finally disappeared through the gate: the
rumble of its wheels had died away; and no flag floated defiantly in
the sun, no cannons proclaimed the passing of a dynasty. From out the
frosted cake of our existence Fate had cut an irreplaceable segment;
turn which way we would, the void was present. We sneaked off in
different directions, mutually undesirous of company; and it seemed
borne in upon me that I ought to go and dig my garden right over, from
end to end. It didn't actually want digging; on the other hand, no
amount of digging could affect it, for good or for evil; so I worked
steadily, strenuously, under the hot sun, stifling thought in action. At
the end of an hour or so, I was joined by Edward.

“I've been chopping up wood,” he explained, in a guilty sort of way,
though nobody had called on him to account for his doings.

“What for?” I inquired, stupidly. “There's piles and piles of it chopped
up already.”

“I know,” said Edward; “but there's no harm in having a bit over.
You never can tell what may happen. But what have you been doing all
this digging for?”

“You said it was going to rain,” I explained, hastily; “so I thought
I'd get the digging done before it came. Good gardeners always tell you
that's the right thing to do.”

“It did look like rain at one time,” Edward admitted; “but it's passed
off now. Very queer weather we're having. I suppose that's why I've felt
so funny all day.”

“Yes, I suppose it's the weather,” I replied. “_I've_ been feeling funny
too.”

The weather had nothing to do with it, as we well knew. But we would
both have died rather than have admitted the real reason.




THE BLUE ROOM

That nature has her moments of sympathy with man has been noted often
enough,--and generally as a new discovery; to us, who had never known
any other condition of things, it seemed entirely right and fitting that
the wind sang and sobbed in the poplar tops, and in the lulls of
it, sudden spirts of rain spattered the already dusty roads, on that
blusterous March day when Edward and I awaited, on the station platform,
the arrival of the new tutor. Needless to say, this arrangement had been
planned by an aunt, from some fond idea that our shy, innocent young
natures would unfold themselves during the walk from the station, and
that on the revelation of each other's more solid qualities that must
then inevitably ensue, an enduring friendship springing from mutual
respect might be firmly based. A pretty dream,--nothing more. For
Edward, who foresaw that the brunt of tutorial oppression would have
to be borne by him, was sulky, monosyllabic, and determined to be as
negatively disagreeable as good manners would permit. It was therefore
evident that I would have to be spokesman and purveyor of hollow
civilities, and I was none the more amiable on that account; all
courtesies, welcomes, explanations, and other court-chamberlain kind of
business, being my special aversion. There was much of the tempestuous
March weather in the hearts of both of us, as we sullenly glowered along
the carriage-windows of the slackening train.

One is apt, however, to misjudge the special difficulties of a
situation; and the reception proved, after all, an easy and informal
matter. In a trainful so uniformly bucolic, a tutor was readily
recognisable; and his portmanteau had been consigned to the
luggage-cart, and his person conveyed into the lane, before I had
discharged one of my carefully considered sentences. I breathed more
easily, and, looking up at our new friend as we stepped out together,
remembered that we had been counting on something altogether more
arid, scholastic, and severe. A boyish eager face and a petulant
pince-nez,--untidy hair,--a head of constant quick turns like a robin's,
and a voice that kept breaking into alto,--these were all very strange
and new, but not in the least terrible.

He proceeded jerkily through the village, with glances on this side and
that; and “Charming,” he broke out presently; “quite too charming and
delightful!”

I had not counted on this sort of thing, and glanced for help to Edward,
who, hands in pockets, looked grimly down his nose. He had taken his
line, and meant to stick to it.

Meantime our friend had made an imaginary spy-glass out of his fist,
and was squinting through it at something I could not perceive. “What an
exquisite bit!” he burst out; “fifteenth century,--no,--yes, it is!”

I began to feel puzzled, not to say alarmed. It reminded me of the
butcher in the Arabian Nights, whose common joints, displayed on the
shop-front, took to a startled public the appearance of dismembered
humanity. This man seemed to see the strangest things in our dull,
familiar surroundings.

“Ah!” he broke out again, as we jogged on between hedgerows: “and
that field now--backed by the downs--with the rain-cloud brooding over
it,--that's all David Cox--every bit of it!”

“That field belongs to Farmer Larkin,” I explained politely, for of
course he could not be expected to know. “I'll take you over to Farmer
Cox's to-morrow, if he's a friend of yours; but there's nothing to see
there.”

Edward, who was hanging sullenly behind, made a face at me, as if to
say, “What sort of lunatic have we got here?”

“It has the true pastoral character, this country of yours,” went on our
enthusiast: “with just that added touch in cottage and farmstead,
relics of a bygone art, which makes our English landscape so divine, so
unique!”

Really this grasshopper was becoming a burden. These familiar fields and
farms, of which we knew every blade and stick, had done nothing that
I knew of to be bespattered with adjectives in this way. I had never
thought of them as divine, unique, or anything else. They were--well,
they were just themselves, and there was an end of it. Despairingly I
jogged Edward in the ribs, as a sign to start rational conversation, but
he only grinned and continued obdurate.

“You can see the house now,” I remarked, presently; “and that's Selina,
chasing the donkey in the paddock,--or is it the donkey chasing Selina?
I can't quite make out; but it's THEM, anyhow.”

Needless to say, he exploded with a full charge of adjectives.
“Exquisite!” he rapped out; “so mellow and harmonious! and so entirely
in keeping!” (I could see from Edward's face that he was thinking who
ought to be in keeping.) “Such possibilities of romance, now, in those
old gables!”

“If you mean the garrets,” I said, “there's a lot of old furniture
in them; and one is generally full of apples; and the bats get
in sometimes, under the eaves, and flop about till we go up with
hair-brushes and things and drive 'em out; but there's nothing else in
them that I know of.”

“Oh, but there must be more than bats,” he cried. “Don't tell me there
are no ghosts. I shall be deeply disappointed if there aren't any
ghosts.”

I did not think it worth while to reply, feeling really unequal to this
sort of conversation; besides, we were nearing the house, when my task
would be ended. Aunt Eliza met us at the door, and in the cross-fire of
adjectives that ensued--both of them talking at once, as grown-up folk
have a habit of doing--we two slipped round to the back of the house,
and speedily put several solid acres between us and civilisation, for
fear of being ordered in to tea in the drawing-room. By the time we
returned, our new importation had gone up to dress for dinner, so till
the morrow at least we were free of him.

Meanwhile the March wind, after dropping a while at sundown, had been
steadily increasing in volume; and although I fell asleep at my usual
hour, about midnight I was wakened by the stress and cry of it. In the
bright moonlight, wind-swung branches tossed and swayed eerily across
the blinds; there was rumbling in chimneys, whistling in keyholes, and
everywhere a clamour and a call. Sleep was out of the question, and,
sitting up in bed, I looked round. Edward sat up too. “I was wondering
when you were going to wake,” he said. “It's no good trying to sleep
through this. I vote we get up and do something.”

“I'm game,” I replied. “Let's play at being in a ship at sea” (the
plaint of the old house under the buffeting wind suggested this,
naturally); “and we can be wrecked on an island, or left on a raft,
whichever you choose; but I like an island best myself, because there's
more things on it.”

Edward on reflection negatived the idea. “It would make too much noise,”
 he pointed out. “There's no fun playing at ships, unless you can make a
jolly good row.”

The door creaked, and a small figure in white slipped cautiously in.
“Thought I heard you talking,” said Charlotte. “We don't like it; we're
afraid--Selina too. She'll be here in a minute. She's putting on her new
dressing-gown she's so proud of.”

His arms round his knees, Edward cogitated deeply until Selina appeared,
barefooted, and looking slim and tall in the new dressing-gown. Then,
“Look here,” he exclaimed; “now we're all together, I vote we go and
explore!”

“You're always wanting to explore,” I said. “What on earth is there to
explore for in this house?”

“Biscuits!” said the inspired Edward.

“Hooray! Come on!” chimed in Harold, sitting up suddenly. He had been
awake all the time, but had been shamming asleep, lest he should be
fagged to do anything.

It was indeed a fact, as Edward had remembered, that our thoughtless
elders occasionally left the biscuits out, a prize for the night-walking
adventurer with nerves of steel.

Edward tumbled out of bed, and pulled a baggy old pair of knickerbockers
over his bare shanks. Then he girt himself with a belt, into which
he thrust, on the one side a large wooden pistol, on the other an
old single-stick; and finally he donned a big slouch-hat--once
an uncle's--that we used for playing Guy Fawkes and Charles-the-Second
up-a-tree in. Whatever the audience, Edward, if possible, always dressed
for his parts with care and conscientiousness; while Harold and I, true
Elizabethans, cared little about the mounting of the piece, so long as
the real dramatic heart of it beat sound.

Our commander now enjoined on us a silence deep as the grave, reminding
us that Aunt Eliza usually slept with an open door, past which we had to
file.

“But we'll take the short cut through the Blue Room,” said the wary
Selina.

“Of course,” said Edward, approvingly. “I forgot about that. Now then!
You lead the way!”

The Blue Room had in prehistoric times been added to by taking in a
superfluous passage, and so not only had the advantage of two doors, but
enabled us to get to the head of the stairs without passing the chamber
wherein our dragon-aunt lay couched. It was rarely occupied, except when
a casual uncle came down for the night. We entered in noiseless file,
the room being plunged in darkness, except for a bright strip of
moonlight on the floor, across which we must pass for our exit. On this
our leading lady chose to pause, seizing the opportunity to study the
hang of her new dressing-gown. Greatly satisfied thereat, she proceeded,
after the feminine fashion, to peacock and to pose, pacing a minuet
down the moonlit patch with an imaginary partner. This was too much for
Edward's histrionic instincts, and after a moment's pause he drew his
single-stick, and with flourishes meet for the occasion, strode onto the
stage. A struggle ensued on approved lines, at the end of which Selina
was stabbed slowly and with unction, and her corpse borne from the
chamber by the ruthless cavalier. The rest of us rushed after in a
clump, with capers and gesticulations of delight; the special charm of
the performance lying in the necessity for its being carried out with
the dumbest of dumb shows.

Once out on the dark landing, the noise of the storm without told us
that we had exaggerated the necessity for silence; so, grasping the
tails of each other's nightgowns even as Alpine climbers rope
themselves together in perilous places, we fared stoutly down the
staircase-moraine, and across the grim glacier of the hall, to where a
faint glimmer from the half-open door of the drawing-room beckoned to
us like friendly hostel-lights. Entering, we found that our thriftless
seniors had left the sound red heart of a fire, easily coaxed into a
cheerful blaze; and biscuits--a plateful--smiled at us in an encouraging
sort of way, together with the halves of a lemon, already once squeezed
but still suckable. The biscuits were righteously shared, the lemon
segments passed from mouth to mouth; and as we squatted round the fire,
its genial warmth consoling our unclad limbs, we realised that so many
nocturnal perils had not been braved in vain.

“It's a funny thing,” said Edward, as we chatted, “how; I hate this room
in the daytime. It always means having your face washed, and your hair
brushed, and talking silly company talk. But to-night it's really quite
jolly. Looks different, somehow.”

“I never can make out,” I said, “what people come here to tea for.
They can have their own tea at home if they like,--they're not poor
people,--with jam and things, and drink out of their saucer, and suck
their fingers and enjoy themselves; but they come here from a long way
off, and sit up straight with their feet off the bars of their chairs,
and have one cup, and talk the same sort of stuff every time.”

Selina sniffed disdainfully. “You don't know anything about it,” she
said. “In society you have to call on each other. It's the proper thing
to do.”

“Pooh! YOU'RE not in society,” said Edward, politely; “and, what's more,
you never will be.”

“Yes, I shall, some day,” retorted Selina; “but I shan't ask you to come
and see me, so there!”

“Wouldn't come if you did,” growled Edward.

“Well, you won't get the chance,” rejoined our sister, claiming her
right of the last word. There was no heat about these little amenities,
which made up--as we understood it--the art of polite conversation.

“I don 't like society people,” put in Harold from the sofa, where he
was sprawling at full length,--a sight the daylight hours would have
blushed to witness. “There were some of 'em here this afternoon, when
you two had gone off to the station. Oh, and I found a dead mouse on the
lawn, and I wanted to skin it, but I wasn't sure I knew how, by myself;
and they came out into the garden and patted my head,--I wish people
wouldn't do that,--and one of 'em asked me to pick her a flower. Don't
know why she couldn't pick it herself; but I said, 'All right, I will if
you'll hold my mouse.' But she screamed, and threw it away; and Augustus
(the cat) got it, and ran away with it. I believe it was really his
mouse all the time, 'cos he'd been looking about as if he had lost
something, so I wasn't angry with HIM; but what did SHE want to throw
away my mouse for?”

“You have to be careful with mice,” reflected Edward; “they're such
slippery things. Do you remember we were playing with a dead mouse once
on the piano, and the mouse was Robinson Crusoe, and the piano was the
island, and somehow Crusoe slipped down inside the island, into its
works, and we couldn't get him out, though we tried rakes and all sorts
of things, till the tuner came. And that wasn't till a week after, and
then--”

Here Charlotte, who had been nodding solemnly, fell over into the
fender; and we realised that the wind had dropped at last, and the house
was lapped in a great stillness. Our vacant beds seemed to be calling
to us imperiously; and we were all glad when Edward gave the signal
for retreat. At the top of the staircase Harold unexpectedly turned
mutinous, insisting on his right to slide down the banisters in a
free country. Circumstances did not allow of argument; I suggested
frog's-marching instead, and frog's-marched he accordingly was, the
procession passing solemnly across the moonlit Blue Room, with Harold
horizontal and limply submissive. Snug in bed at last, I was just
slipping off into slumber when I heard Edward explode, with chuckle and
snort.

“By Jove!” he said; “I forgot all about it. The new tutor's sleeping in
the Blue Room!”

“Lucky he didn't wake up and catch us,” I grunted, drowsily; and both of
us, without another thought on the matter, sank into well-earned repose.

Next morning we came down to breakfast braced to grapple with fresh
adversity, but were surprised to find our garrulous friend of the
previous day--he was late in making his appearance--strangely silent and
(apparently) preoccupied. Having polished off our porridge, we ran out
to feed the rabbits, explaining to them that a beast of a tutor would
prevent their enjoying so much of our society as formerly.

On returning to the house at the fated hour appointed for study, we
were thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the
drive, freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally
uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she
thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too ready
to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from our minds.

Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a flying
visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly, Psyche: a
Journal of the Unseen; and proceeded laborously to rid himself of
much incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We bore it
patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious to
get at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay in a
paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum habitation.
“Case III.,” it began. “The following particulars were communicated by
a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness,
and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience.” A fairly accurate
description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable;
but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about
apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner
betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The
fellow was not even original. All the old material was there,--the storm
at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder re-enacted,
and so on,--already worn threadbare in many a Christmas Number. No one
was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its connexion with
our quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always suspected the man,
persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a brief span was, somehow or
other, at the bottom of it.




A FALLING OUT

Harold told me the main facts of this episode some time later,--in bits,
and with reluctance. It was not a recollection he cared to talk about.
The crude blank misery of a moment is apt to leave a dull bruise which
is slow to depart, if it ever does so entirely; and Harold confesses
to a twinge or two, still, at times, like the veteran who brings home a
bullet inside him from martial plains over sea.

He knew he was a brute the moment he had done it; Selina had not meant
to worry, only to comfort and assist. But his soul was one raw sore
within him, when he found himself shut up in the schoolroom after hours,
merely for insisting that 7 times 7 amounted to 47. The injustice of it
seemed so flagrant. Why not 47 as much as 49? One number was no prettier
than the other to look at, and it was evidently only a matter of
arbitrary taste and preference, and, anyhow, it had always been 47 to
him, and would be to the end of time. So when Selina came in out of the
sun, leaving the Trappers or the Far West behind her, and putting off
the glory of being an Apache squaw in order to hear him his tables and
win his release, Harold turned on her venomously, rejected her kindly
overtures, and ever drove his elbow into her sympathetic ribs, in his
determination to be left alone in the glory of sulks. The fit passed
directly, his eyes were opened, and his soul sat in the dust as he
sorrowfully began to cast about for some atonement heroic enough to
salve the wrong.

Of course poor Selina looked for no sacrifice nor heroics whatever: she
didn't even want him to say he was sorry. If he would only make it up,
she would have done the apologising part herself. But that was not a
boy's way. Something solid, Harold felt, was due from him; and until
that was achieved, making-up must not be thought of, in order that the
final effect might not be spoilt. Accordingly, when his release came,
and poor Selina hung about, trying to catch his eye, Harold, possessed
by the demon of a distorted motive, avoided her steadily--though he
was bleeding inwardly at every minute of delay--and came to me instead.
Needless to say, I approved his plan highly; it was so much more
high-toned than just going and making-up tamely, which any one could do;
and a girl who had been jobbed in the ribs by a hostile elbow could
not be expected for a moment to overlook it, without the liniment of an
offering to soothe her injured feelings.

“I know what she wants most,” said Harold. “She wants that set of
tea-things in the toy-shop window, with the red and blue flowers on 'em;
she's wanted it for months, 'cos her dolls are getting big enough to
have real afternoon tea; and she wants it so badly that she won't walk
that side of the street when we go into the town. But it costs five
shillings!”

Then we set to work seriously, and devoted the afternoon to a
realisation of assets and the composition of a Budget that might have
been dated without shame from Whitehall. The result worked out as
follows:--

                                                       s. d.
     By one uncle, unspent through having been
         lost for nearly a week--turned up at last
         in the straw of the dog-kennel .  .  .  .     2  6

                                                 ----
                             Carry forward,            2  6


                                                       s. d.
                             Brought forward,          2  6
     By advance from me on security of next
         uncle, and failing that, to be called in at
         Christmas .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  1  0
     By shaken out of missionary-box with the
         help of a knife-blade.  (They were our
         own pennies and a forced levy) .  .  .  .  .  0  4
     By bet due from Edward, for walking across
         the field where Farmer Larkin's bull was,
         and Edward bet him twopence he wouldn't
         --called in with difficulty .  .  .  .  .  .  0  2
     By advance from Martha, on no security at
         all, only you mustn't tell your aunt .  .  .  1  0

                                                       ----

                                               Total   5  0

and at last we breathed again.

The rest promised to be easy. Selina had a tea-party at five on the
morrow, with the chipped old wooden tea-things that had served her
successive dolls from babyhood. Harold would slip off directly after
dinner, going alone, so as not to arouse suspicion, as we were not
allowed to go into the town by ourselves. It was nearly two miles to our
small metropolis, but there would be plenty of time for him to go and
return, even laden with the olive-branch neatly packed in shavings;
besides, he might meet the butcher, who was his friend and would give
him a lift. Then, finally, at five, the rapture of the new tea-service,
descended from the skies; and, retribution made, making-up at last,
without loss of dignity. With the event before us, we thought it a small
thing that twenty-four hours more of alienation and pretended sulks must
be kept up on Harold's part; but Selina, who naturally knew nothing of
the treat in store for her, moped for the rest of the evening, and took
a very heavy heart to bed.

When next day the hour for action arrived, Harold evaded Olympian
attention with an easy modesty born of long practice, and made off for
the front gate. Selina, who had been keeping her eye upon him, thought
he was going down to the pond to catch frogs, a joy they had planned
to share together, and made after him; but Harold, though he heard her
footsteps, continued sternly on his high mission, without even looking
back; and Selina was left to wander disconsolately among flower-beds
that had lost--for her--all scent and colour. I saw it all, and although
cold reason approved our line of action, instinct told me we were
brutes.

Harold reached the town--so he recounted afterwards--in record time,
having run most of the way for fear the tea-things, which had
reposed six months in the window, should be snapped up by some other
conscience-stricken lacerator of a sister's feelings; and it seemed
hardly credible to find them still there, and their owner willing to
part with them for the price marked on the ticket. He paid his money
down at once, that there should be no drawing back from the bargain; and
then, as the things had to be taken out of the window and packed, and
the afternoon was yet young, he thought he might treat himself to a
taste of urban joys and la vie de Boheme. Shops came first, of course,
and he flattened his nose successively against the window with the
india-rubber balls in it, and the clock-work locomotive; and against
the barber's window, with wigs on blocks, reminding him of uncles,
and shaving-cream that looked so good to eat; and the grocer's window,
displaying more currants than the whole British population could
possibly consume without a special effort; and the window of the
bank, wherein gold was thought so little of that it was dealt about in
shovels. Next there was the market-place, with all its clamorous joys;
and when a runaway calf came down the street like a cannon-ball, Harold
felt that he had not lived in vain. The whole place was so brimful of
excitement that he had quite forgotten the why and the wherefore of his
being there, when a sight of the church clock recalled him to his better
self, and sent him flying out of the town, as he realised he had only
just time enough left to get back in. If he were after his appointed
hour, he would not only miss his high triumph, but probably would be
detected as a transgressor of bounds,--a crime before which a private
opinion on multiplication sank to nothingness. So he jogged along on his
homeward way, thinking of many things, and probably talking to himself
a good deal, as his habit was, and had covered nearly half the distance,
when suddenly--a deadly sinking in the pit of his stomach--a paralysis
of every limb--around him a world extinct of light and music--a black
sun and a reeling sky--he had forgotten the tea-things!

It was useless, it was hopeless, all was over, and nothing could now be
done; nevertheless he turned and ran back wildly, blindly, choking
with the big sobs that evoked neither pity nor comfort from a merciless
mocking world around; a stitch in his side, dust in his eyes, and black
despair clutching at his heart. So he stumbled on, with leaden legs and
bursting sides, till--as if Fate had not yet dealt him her last worst
buffet--on turning a corner in the road he almost ran under the wheels
of a dog-cart, in which, as it pulled up, was apparent the portly form
of Farmer Larkin, the arch-enemy, whose ducks he had been shying stones
at that very morning!

Had Harold been in his right and unclouded senses, he would have
vanished through the hedge some seconds earlier, rather than pain the
farmer by any unpleasant reminiscences which his appearance might call
up; but as things were, he could only stand and blubber hopelessly,
caring, indeed, little now what further ill might befall him.
The farmer, for his part, surveyed the desolate figure with some
astonishment, calling out in no unfriendly accents, “Why, Master Harold!
whatever be the matter? Baint runnin' away, be ee?”

Then Harold, with the unnatural courage born of desperation, flung
himself on the step, and climbing into the cart, fell in the straw at
the bottom of it, sobbing out that he wanted to go back, go back! The
situation had a vagueness; but the farmer, a man of action rather than
words, swung his horse round smartly, and they were in the town again
by the time Harold had recovered himself sufficiently to furnish some
details. As they drove up to the shop, the woman was waiting at the door
with the parcel; and hardly a minute seemed to have elapsed since the
black crisis, ere they were bowling along swiftly home, the precious
parcel hugged in a close embrace.

And now the farmer came out in quite a new and unexpected light. Never
a word did he say of broken fences and hurdles, of trampled crops and
harried flocks and herds. One would have thought the man had never
possessed a head of live stock in his life. Instead, he was deeply
interested in the whole dolorous quest of the tea-things, and
sympathised with Harold on the disputed point in mathematics as if he
had been himself at the same stage of education. As they neared home,
Harold found himself, to his surprise, sitting up and chatting to his
new friend like man to man; and before he was dropped at a convenient
gap in the garden hedge, he had promised that when Selina gave her first
public tea-party, little Miss Larkin should be invited to come and
bring ha whole sawdust family along with her; and the farmer appeared
as pleased and proud as if he hat been asked to a garden-party at
Marlborough House. Really, those Olympians have certain good points, far
down in them. I shall have to leave off abusing them some day.

At the hour of five, Selina, having spent the afternoon searching for
Harold in all his accustomed haunts, sat down disconsolately to tea with
her dolls, who ungenerously refused to wait beyond the appointed hour.
The wooden tea-things seemed more chipped than usual; and the dolls
themselves had more of wax and sawdust, and less of human colour and
intelligence about them, than she ever remembered before. It was then
that Harold burst in, very dusty, his stockings at his heels, and the
channels ploughed by tears still showing on his grimy cheeks; and Selina
was at last permitted to know that he had been thinking of her ever
since his ill-judged exhibition of temper, and that his sulks had not
been the genuine article, nor had he gone frogging by himself. It was
a very happy hostess who dispensed hospitality that evening to a
glassy-eyed stiff-kneed circle; and many a dollish gaucherie, that would
have been severely checked on ordinary occasions, was as much overlooked
as if it had been a birthday.

But Harold and I, in our stupid masculine way, thought all her happiness
sprang from possession of the long-coveted tea-service.




“LUSISTI SATIS”

Among the many fatuous ideas that possessed the Olympian noddle, this
one was pre-eminent; that, being Olympians, they could talk quite freely
in our presence on subjects of the closest import to us, so long as
names, dates, and other landmarks were ignored. We were supposed to
be denied the faculty for putting two and two together; and, like the
monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set
to earn their livings, we were careful to conceal our capabilities for
a simple syllogism. Thus we were rarely taken by surprise, and so were
considered by our disappointed elders to be apathetic and to lack the
divine capacity for wonder.

Now the daily output of the letter-bag, with the mysterious discussions
that ensued thereon, had speedily informed us that Uncle Thomas was
intrusted with a mission,--a mission, too, affecting ourselves. Uncle
Thomas's missions were many and various; a self-important man, one
liking the business while protesting that he sank under the burden, he
was the missionary, so to speak, of our remote habitation. The
matching a ribbon, the running down to the stores, the interviewing a
cook,--these and similar duties lent constant colour and variety to
his vacant life in London and helped to keep down his figure. When the
matter, however, had in our presence to be referred to with nods and
pronouns, with significant hiatuses and interpolations in the French
tongue, then the red flag was flown, the storm-cone hoisted, and by a
studious pretence of inattention we were not long in plucking out the
heart of the mystery.

To clinch our conclusion, we descended suddenly and together on Martha;
proceeding, however, not by simple inquiry as to facts,--that would
never have done,--but by informing her that the air was full of school
and that we knew all about it, and then challenging denial. Martha was
a trusty soul, but a bad witness for the defence, and we soon had it all
out of her. The word had gone forth, the school had been selected; the
necessary sheets were hemming even now; and Edward was the designated
and appointed victim.

It had always been before us as an inevitable bourne, this
strange unknown thing called school; and yet--perhaps I should say
consequently--we had never seriously set ourselves to consider what it
really meant. But now that the grim spectre loomed imminent, stretching
lean hands for one of our flock, it behoved us to face the situation,
to take soundings in this uncharted sea and find out whither we were
drifting. Unfortunately, the data in our possession were absolutely
insufficient, and we knew not whither to turn for exact information.
Uncle Thomas could have told us all about it, of course; he had been
there himself, once, in the dim and misty past. But an unfortunate
conviction, that Nature had intended him for a humourist, tainted all
his evidence, besides making it wearisome to hear. Again, of such among
our contemporaries as we had approached, the trumpets gave forth
an uncertain sound. According to some, it meant larks, revels,
emancipation, and a foretaste of the bliss of manhood. According to
others,--the majority, alas!--it was a private and peculiar Hades, that
could give the original institution points and a beating. When Edward
was observed to be swaggering round with a jaunty air and his chest
stuck out, I knew that he was contemplating his future from the one
point of view. When, on the contrary, he was subdued and unaggressive,
and sought the society of his sisters, I recognised that the other
aspect was in the ascendant. “You can always run away, you know,” I
used to remark consolingly on these latter occasions; and Edward would
brighten up wonderfully at the suggestion, while Charlotte melted into
tears before her vision of a brother with blistered feet and an empty
belly, passing nights of frost 'neath the lee of windy haystacks.

It was to Edward, of course, that the situation was chiefly productive
of anxiety; and yet the ensuing change in my own circumstances and
position furnished me also with food for grave reflexion. Hitherto I
had acted mostly to orders. Even when I had devised and counselled any
particular devilry, it had been carried out on Edward's approbation,
and--as eldest--at his special risk. Henceforward I began to be anxious
of the bugbear Responsibility, and to realise what a soul-throttling
thing it is. True, my new position would have its compensations.

Edward had been masterful exceedingly, imperious, perhaps a little
narrow; impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for
make-believe. I should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception
and carrying out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to better
artistic purpose.

It would, moreover, be needless to be a Radical any more. Radical I
never was, really, by nature or by sympathy. The part had been thrust
on me one day, when Edward proposed to foist the House of Lords on our
small Republic. The principles of the thing he set forth learnedly and
well, and it all sounded promising enough, till he went on to explain
that, for the present at least, he proposed to be the House of Lords
himself. We others were to be the Commons. There would be promotions, of
course, he added, dependent on service and on fitness, and open to both
sexes; and to me in especial he held out hopes of speedy advancement.
But in its initial stages the thing wouldn't work properly unless he
were first and only Lord. Then I put my foot down promptly, and said
it was all rot, and I didn't see the good of any House of Lords at all.
“Then you must be a low Radical!” said Edward, with fine contempt. The
inference seemed hardly necessary, but what could I do? I accepted the
situation, and said firmly, Yes, I was a low Radical. In this monstrous
character I had been obliged to masquerade ever since; but now I could
throw it off, and look the world in the face again.

And yet, did this and other gains really out-balance my losses?
Henceforth I should, it was true, be leader and chief; but I should also
be the buffer between the Olympians and my little clan. To Edward
this had been nothing; he had withstood the impact of Olympus without
flinching, like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved. But was I equal to the
task? And was there not rather a danger that for the sake of peace and
quietness I might be tempted to compromise, compound, and make terms?
sinking thus, by successive lapses, into the Blameless Prig? I don't
mean, of course, that I thought out my thoughts to the exact point here
set down. In those fortunate days of old one was free from the hard
necessity of transmuting the vague idea into the mechanical inadequate
medium of words. But the feeling was there, that I might not possess the
qualities of character for so delicate a position.

The unnatural halo round Edward got more pronounced, his own demeanour
more responsible and dignified, with the arrival of his new clothes.
When his trunk and play-box were sent in, the approaching cleavage
between our brother, who now belonged to the future, and ourselves,
still claimed by the past, was accentuated indeed. His name was painted
on each of them, in large letters, and after their arrival their owner
used to disappear mysteriously, and be found eventually wandering round
his luggage, murmuring to himself, “Edward----,” in a rapt, remote sort
of way. It was a weakness, of course, and pointed to a soft spot in
his character; but those who can remember the sensation of first seeing
their names in print will not think hardly of him.

As the short days sped by and the grim event cast its shadow longer and
longer across our threshold, an unnatural politeness, a civility scarce
canny, began to pervade the air. In those latter hours Edward himself
was frequently heard to say “Please,” and also “Would you mind fetchin'
that ball?” while Harold and I would sometimes actually find ourselves
trying to anticipate his wishes. As for the girls, they simply
grovelled. The Olympians, too, in their uncouth way, by gift of carnal
delicacies and such-like indulgence, seemed anxious to demonstrate that
they had hitherto misjudged this one of us. Altogether the situation
grew strained and false, and I think a general relief was felt when the
end came.

We all trooped down to the station, of course; it is only in later
years that the farce of “seeing people off” is seen in its true colours.
Edward was the life and soul of the party; and if his gaiety struck one
at times as being a trifle overdone, it was not a moment to be critical.
As we tramped along, I promised him I would ask Farmer Larkin not to
kill any more pigs till he came back for the holidays, and he said he
would send me a proper catapult,--the real lethal article, not a kid's
plaything. Then suddenly, when we were about half-way down, one of the
girls fell a-snivelling.

The happy few who dare to laugh at the woes of sea-sickness will perhaps
remember how, on occasion, the sudden collapse of a fellow-voyager
before their very eyes has caused them hastily to revise their
self-confidence and resolve to walk more humbly for the future. Even so
it was with Edward, who turned his head aside, feigning an interest in
the landscape. It was but for a moment; then he recollected the hat he
was wearing,--a hard bowler, the first of that sort he had ever owned.
He took it off, examined it, and felt it over. Something about it seemed
to give him strength, and he was a man once more.

At the station, Edward's first care was to dispose his boxes on the
platform so that every one might see the labels and the lettering
thereon. One did not go to school for the first time every day! Then he
read both sides of his ticket carefully; shifted it to every one of his
pockets in turn; and finally fell to chinking of his money, to keep his
courage up. We were all dry of conversation by this time, and could only
stand round and stare in silence at the victim decked for the altar.
And, as I looked at Edward, in new clothes of a manly cut, with a hard
hat upon his head, a railway ticket in one pocket and money of his own
in the other,--money to spend as he liked and no questions asked!--I
began to feel dimly how great was the gulf already yawning betwixt us.
Fortunately I was not old enough to realise, further, that here on this
little platform the old order lay at its last gasp, and that Edward
might come back to us, but it would not be the Edward of yore, nor could
things ever be the same again.

When the train steamed up at last, we all boarded it impetuously with
the view of selecting the one peerless carriage to which Edward might
be intrusted with the greatest comfort and honour; and as each one found
the ideal compartment at the same moment, and vociferously maintained
its merits, he stood some chance for a time of being left behind. A
porter settled the matter by heaving him through the nearest door; and
as the train moved off, Edward's head was thrust out of the window,
wearing on it an unmistakable first-quality grin that he had been saving
up somewhere for the supreme moment. Very small and white his face
looked, on the long side of the retreating train. But the grin was
visible, undeniable, stoutly maintained; till a curve swept him from
our sight, and he was borne away in the dying rumble, out of our placid
backwater, out into the busy world of rubs and knocks and competition,
out into the New Life.

When a crab has lost a leg, his gait is still more awkward than his
wont, till Time and healing Nature make him totus teres atque rotundus
once more. We straggled back from the station disjointedly; Harold, who
was very silent, sticking close to me, his last slender props while
the girls in front, their heads together, were already reckoning up
the weeks to the holidays. Home at last, Harold suggested one or two
occupations of a spicy and contraband flavour, but though we did our
manful best there was no knocking any interest out of them. Then I
suggested others, with the same want of success. Finally we found
ourselves sitting silent on an upturned wheelbarrow, our chins on our
fists, staring haggardly into the raw new conditions of our changed
life, the ruins of a past behind our backs.

And all the while Selina and Charlotte were busy stuffing Edward's
rabbits with unwonted forage, bilious and green; polishing up the cage
of his mice till the occupants raved and swore like householders in
spring-time; and collecting materials for new bows and arrows, whips,
boats, guns, and four-in-hand harness, against the return of Ulysses.
Little did they dream that the hero, once back from Troy and all its
onsets, would scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious armoury
as rot and humbug and only fit for kids! This, with many another like
awakening, was mercifully hidden from them. Could the veil have been
lifted, and the girls permitted to see Edward as he would appear a short
three months hence, ragged of attire and lawless of tongue, a scorner of
tradition and an adept in strange new physical tortures, one who
would in the same half-hour dismember a doll and shatter a hallowed
belief,--in fine, a sort of swaggering Captain, fresh from the Spanish
Main,--could they have had the least hint of this, well, then perhaps--.
But which of us is of mental fibre to stand the test of a glimpse into
futurity? Let us only hope that, even with certain disillusionment
ahead, the girls would have acted precisely as they did.

And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children
and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing
pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves,
a very short time hence. So we pass, with a gusto and a heartiness that
to an onlooker would seem almost pathetic, from one droll devotion to
another misshapen passion; and who shall care to play Rhadamanthus, to
appraise the record, and to decide how much of it is solid achievement,
and how much the merest child's play?