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But Alice was less delicately moulded. She said:

“Oh, if you please, we are most awfully sorry, and we hope you’ll forgive us, but we thought it would be such a pity for you and all the other poor dear Antiquities to come all that way and then find nothing Roman–so we put some pots and things in the barrow for you to find.”

“So I perceived,” said the President, stroking his white beard and smiling most agreeably at us; “a harmless joke, my dear! Youth’s the season for jesting. There’s no harm done–pray think no more about it. It’s very honorable of you to come and apologize, I’m sure.”

His brow began to wear the furrowed, anxious look of one who would fain be rid of his guests and get back to what he was doing before they interrupted him.

Alice said, “We didn’t come for that. It’s much worse. Those were two real true Roman jugs you took away; we put them there; they aren’t ours. We didn’t know they were real Roman. We wanted to sell the Antiquities–I mean Antiquaries–and we were sold ourselves.”

“This is serious,” said the gentleman. “I suppose you’d know the–the ‘jugs’ if you saw them again?”

“Anywhere,” said Oswald, with the confidential rashness of one who does not know what he is talking about.

Mr. Longchamps opened the door of a little room leading out of the one we were in, and beckoned us to follow. We found ourselves amid shelves and shelves of pottery of all sorts; and two whole shelves–small ones–were filled with the sort of jug we wanted.

“Well,” said the President, with a veiled, menacing sort of smile, like a wicked cardinal, “which is it?”

Oswald said, “I don’t know.”

Alice said, “I should know if I had it in my hand.”

The President patiently took the jugs down one after another, and Alice tried to look inside them. And one after another she shook her head and gave them back.

At last she said, “You didn’t wash them?”

Mr. Longchamps shuddered and said “No.”

“Then,” said Alice, “there is something written with lead-pencil inside both the jugs. I wish I hadn’t. I would rather you didn’t read it. I didn’t know it would be a nice old gentleman like you would find it. I thought it would be the younger gentleman with the thin legs and the narrow smile.”

“Mr. Turnbull.” The President seemed to recognize the description unerringly. “Well, well–boys will be boys–girls, I mean. I won’t be angry. Look at all the ‘jugs’ and see if you can find yours.”

Alice did–and the next one she looked at she said, “This is one”–and two jugs further on she said, “This is the other.”

“Well,” the President said, “these are certainly the specimens which I obtained yesterday. If your uncle will call on me I will return them to him. But it’s a disappointment. Yes. I think you must let me look inside.”

He did. And at the first one he said nothing. At the second he laughed.

“Well, well,” he said, “we can’t expect old heads on young shoulders. You’re not the first who went forth to shear and returned shorn. Nor, it appears, am I. Next time you have a Sale of Antiquities, take care that you yourself are not ‘sold.’ Good-day to you, my dear. Don’t let the incident prey on your mind,” he said to Alice. “Bless your heart, I was a boy once myself, unlikely as you may think it. Good-bye.”

* * * * *

We were in time to see the pigs bought, after all.

I asked Alice what on earth it was she’d scribbled inside the beastly jugs, and she owned that just to make the lark complete she had written “Sucks” in one of the jugs, and “Sold again, silly,” in the other.

But we know well enough who it was that was sold. And if ever we have any Antiquities to tea again, they sha’n’t find so much as a Greek waistcoat button if we can help it.

Unless it’s the President, for he did not behave at all badly. For a man of his age I think he behaved exceedingly well. Oswald can picture a very different scene having been enacted over those rotten pots if the President had been an otherwise sort of man.

But that picture is not pleasing, so Oswald will not distress you by drawing it for you. You can most likely do it easily for yourself.