FullReads

Arthur can imitate the Weeding Woman exactly, and he can imitate the Scotch Gardener, too. Chris (that is Christopher, our youngest brother), is very fond of “The Zquire and the Walnuts.” He gets nuts, or anything, like shells or bits of flower-pots, that will break, and something to hit with, and when Arthur comes to “The karnels is dust,” Chris smashes everything before him, shouting, “A cracks aal the lot of ’em” and then he throws the bits all over the place, with “They be no good to he.”

Father laughed very much when he heard Arthur do the Weeding Woman, and Mother could not help laughing, too; but she did not like it, because she does not like us to repeat servants’ gossip.

The Weeding Woman is a great gossip. She gossips all the time she is having her tea, and it is generally about the Old Squire. She used to tell Bessy that his flowers bloomed themselves to death, and the fruit rotted on the walls, because he would let nothing be picked, and gave nothing away, except now and then a grand present of fruit to Lady Catherine, for which the old lady returned no thanks, but only a rude message to say that his peaches were over-ripe, and he had better have sent the grapes to the Infirmary. Adela asked–“Why is the Old Squire so kind to Lady Catherine?” and Father said–“Because we are so fond of Lords and Ladies in this part of the country.” I thought he meant the lords and ladies in the hedges, for we are very fond of them. But he didn’t. He meant real lords and ladies.

There are splendid lords and ladies in the hedges of Mary’s Meadow. I never can make up my mind when I like them best. In April and May, when they have smooth plum-colored coats and pale green cowls, and push up out of last year’s dry leaves, or in August and September, when their hoods have fallen away, and their red berries shine through the dusty grass and nettles that have been growing up round them all the summer out of the ditch.

Flowers were one reason for our wanting to go to Mary’s Meadow. Another reason was the nightingale. There was one that used always to sing there, and Mother had made us a story about it.

We are very fond of fairy books, and one of our greatest favorites is Bechstein’s “As Pretty as Seven.” It has very nice pictures, and we particularly like “The Man in the Moon, and How He Came There;” but the story doesn’t end well, for he came there by gathering sticks on Sunday, and then scoffing about it, and he has been there ever since. But Mother made us a new fairy tale about the nightingale in Mary’s Meadow being the naughty woodcutter’s only child, who was turned into a little brown bird that lives on in the woods, and sits on a tree on summer nights, and sings to its father up in the moon.

But after our Father and the Old Squire went to law, Mother told us we must be content with hearing the nightingale from a distance. We did not really know about the lawsuit then, we only understood that the Old Squire was rather crosser than usual; and we rather resented being warned not to go into Mary’s Meadow, especially as Father kept saying we had a perfect right so to do. I thought that Mother was probably afraid of Saxon being set at us, and of course I had no fears about him. Indeed, I used to wish that it could happen that the Old Squire, riding after me as full of fury as King Padella in the “Rose and the Ring,” might set Saxon on me, as the lions were let loose to eat the Princess Rosalba. “Instead of devouring her with their great teeth, it was with kisses they gobbled her up. They licked her pretty feet, they nuzzled their noses in her lap,” and she put her arms “round their tawny necks and kissed them.” Saxon gobbles us with kisses, and nuzzles his nose, and we put our arms round his tawny neck. What a surprise it would be to the Old Squire to see him! And then I wondered if my feet were as pretty as Rosalba’s, and I thought they were, and I wondered if Saxon would lick them, supposing that by any possibility it could ever happen that I should be barefoot in Mary’s Meadow at the mercy of the Old Squire and his bull-dog.