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Albert’s Uncle’s Grandmother; Or, The Long-Lost
by
As we went down the ladder out of the loft he said:
“There’s one thing we ought to do, though, before we go home. We ought to find Albert’s uncle’s long-lost grandmother for him.”
Alice’s heart beat true and steadfast. She said: “That’s just exactly what Noel and I were saying this morning. Look out, Oswald, you wretch, you’re kicking chaff into my eyes.” She was going down the ladder just under me.
Oswald’s young sister’s thoughtful remark ended in another council. But not in the straw loft. We decided to have a quite new place, and disregarded H. O.’s idea of the dairy and Noel’s of the cellars. We had the new council on the secret staircase, and there we settled exactly what we ought to do. This is the same thing, if you really wish to be good, as what you are going to do. It was a very interesting council, and when it was over Oswald was so pleased to think that the Wouldbegoods was unrecoverishly dead that he gave Denny and Noel, who were sitting on the step below him, a good-humored, playful, gentle, loving, brotherly shove, and said, “Get along down, it’s tea-time!”
No reader who understands justice and the real rightness of things, and who is to blame for what, will ever think it could have been Oswald’s fault that the two other boys got along down by rolling over and over each other, and bursting the door at the bottom of the stairs open by their revolving bodies. And I should like to know whose fault it was that Mrs. Pettigrew was just on the other side of that door at that very minute? The door burst open, and the impetuous bodies of Noel and Denny rolled out of it into Mrs. Pettigrew, and upset her and the tea-tray. Both revolving boys were soaked with tea and milk, and there were one or two cups and things smashed. Mrs. Pettigrew was knocked over, but none of her bones were broken. Noel and Denny were going to be sent to bed, but Oswald said it was all his fault. He really did this to give the others a chance of doing a refined, golden deed by speaking the truth and saying it was not his fault. But you cannot really count on any one. They did not say anything, but only rubbed the lumps on their late-revolving heads. So it was bed for Oswald, and he felt the injustice hard.
But he sat up in bed and read the Last of the Mohicans, and then he began to think. When Oswald really thinks he almost always thinks of something. He thought of something now, and it was miles better than the idea we had decided on in the secret staircase, of advertising in the Kentish Mercury and saying if Albert’s uncle’s long-lost grandmother would call at the Moat House she might hear of something much to her advantage.
What Oswald thought of was that if we went to Hazelbridge and asked Mr. B. Munn, grocer, that drove us home in the cart with the horse that liked the wrong end of the whip best, he would know who the lady was in the red hat and red wheels that paid him to drive us home that Canterbury night. He must have been paid, of course, for even grocers are not generous enough to drive perfect strangers, and five of them too, about the country for nothing.
Thus we may learn that even unjustness and sending the wrong people to bed may bear useful fruit, which ought to be a great comfort to every one when they are unfairly treated. Only it most likely won’t be. For if Oswald’s brothers and sisters had nobly stood by him, as he expected, he would not have had the solitudy reflections that led to the great scheme for finding the grandmother.