FullReads

“I don’t think you can call it stealing,” said Harry. “Fields are a kind of wild places anyhow, and the paddock belongs to Father, and it certainly doesn’t belong to John.”

“No,” said I, doubtfully.

“I won’t get any more; it’s dreadfully hard work,” said Harry, but as he shook the sack out and folded it up, he added (in rather a satisfied tone), “I’ve got a good deal.”

I helped him to wash himself for breakfast, and half way through he suddenly smiled and said, “John Parkinson will be glad when he sees you-know-what, Mary, whatever the other John thinks of it.”

But Harry did not cut any more turfs without leave, for he told me that he had a horrid dream that night of waking up in prison with a warder looking at him through a hole in the door of his cell, and finding out that he was in penal servitude for stealing top spit from the bottom of the paddock, and Father would not take him out of prison, and that Mother did not know about it.

However, he and Arthur made a lot of compost. They said we couldn’t possibly have a Paradise without it.

It made them very impatient. We always want the spring and summer and autumn and winter to get along faster than they do. But this year Arthur and Harry were very impatient with summer.

They were nearly caught one day by Father coming home just as they had got through the gates with Michael’s old sack full of road-scrapings, instead of sand (we have not any sand growing near us, and silver sand is rather dear), but we did get leaves together and stacked them to rot into leaf mould.

Leaf mould is splendid stuff, but it takes a long time for the leaves to get mouldy, and it takes a great many, too. Arthur is rather impatient, and he used to say–“I never saw leaves stick on to branches in such a way. I mean to get into some of these old trees and give them a good shaking to remind them what time of year it is. If I don’t we shan’t have anything like enough leaves for our compost.”

CHAPTER VIII.

Mother was very much surprised by Arthur’s letter, but not so much puzzled as he expected. She knew Parkinson’s Paradisus quite well, and only wrote to me to ask; “What are the boys after with the old books? Does your Father know?”

But when I told her that he had given us leave to be in the library, and that we took great care of the books, and how much we enjoyed the ones about gardening, and all that we were going to do, she was very kind indeed, and promised to put on a blue dress and lace ruffles and be Queen of our Earthly Paradise as soon as she came home.

When she did come home she was much better, and so was Chris. He was delighted to be our Dwarf, but he wanted to have a hump, and he would have such a big one that it would not keep in its place, and kept slipping under his arm and into all sorts of queer positions.

Not one of us enjoyed our new game more than Chris did, and he was always teasing me to tell him the story I had told the others, and to read out the names of the flowers which “the real Queen” had in her “real paradise.” He made Mother promise to try to get him a bulb of the real Dwarf Daffodil as his next birthday present, to put in his own garden.

“And I’ll give you some compost,” said Arthur. “It’ll be ever so much better than a stupid book with ‘stuff’ in it.”

Chris did seem much stronger. He had color in his cheeks, and his head did not look so large. But he seemed to puzzle over things in it as much as ever, and he was just as odd and quaint.