With d.i.c.k I soon won golden opinions, as I took an interest in the birds" eggs, and would consent to carry the wriggling caterpillars and slimy snails which he collected on our walks, or to fill my pockets with stones and other specimens for the museum. This museum was a large cabinet with gla.s.s doors, which filled one entire end of the school-room at Marshlands. It held a very miscellaneous a.s.sortment of treasures, to which both Cathy and the boys were constantly adding, sometimes with rather more zeal than discretion. I shall never forget how d.i.c.k put the hornet"s nest there.
"I"ve smoked it thoroughly with brown paper," he said, "and the grubs are as dead as door-nails, so you needn"t be at all afraid of it."
But I fear the brown paper could not have been strong enough after all.
A few days afterwards we were sitting at tea in the school-room, when a peculiarly irritated buzzing noise began to resound from the region of the cabinet, and Edward, who was giving us an imitation of his cla.s.sical master"s stately style on speech-day, suddenly ducked his head in a most undignified fashion, and, seizing the bread-knife, made a frantic cut into the air.
"It"s a hornet!" he exclaimed. "Just see the size of it! Take care, Cathy, the brute"s going into your hair! Look out! If there isn"t another of them!"
We jumped up in a hurry; there was not only another, but more and more and more, and, like the oysters in the ballad of the walrus and the carpenter, they came up so thick and fast that for the moment it seemed to us as if the whole room were full of yellow stripes and buzzing wings. I am not brave where wasps are concerned, and I am afraid my strong-mindedness went to the winds, and I shrieked like any bread-and-b.u.t.ter miss, at least George a.s.sured me so afterwards. Cathy had the presence of mind to fling her dress over her head, while the boys made a valiant though fruitless effort to slay those within immediate reach.
"Oh, I say!" cried Edward. "This is no joke! They"re all pouring out of the museum. We"d better cut, or there"ll be damage done!"
And we beat an ignominious retreat, leaving our tea cooling upon the table, and the hornets in clear possession of the school-room. The question of how to get rid of them presented some difficulty, it being an unequal match to war with wasps; but in the end a tray full of burning sulphur was thrust through the door, and allowed to smoulder for some hours, after which we were at length able to enter in safety, and sweep up the bodies of our victims in triumph from the floor.
Somehow poor d.i.c.k"s experiments did not always turn out very happily, in spite of the best intentions on his part. Fired by an article in a boys"
magazine, he once volunteered to stuff a dead bullfinch which Cathy had found in the garden, and after a long operation of skinning and drying, he produced it in the school-room with great pride.
"Doesn"t it look a little fatter on one side than on the other?"
suggested Cathy, doubtfully surveying the bullfinch, which was wired upon a twig as no bird in real life had ever perched.
"Nonsense!" said d.i.c.k, pinching his specimen to send the stuffing straight. "It"s just exactly as if it were pecking at a bud. Look at its eyes! I made them out of two black-headed pins I took from the mater"s bonnet."
"I don"t think its tail looks quite natural," said Cathy. "It seems somehow to stick up like a wren"s."
"Well, if you"re going to find fault," answered d.i.c.k indignantly, "just try and do one yourself, that"s all. It"s jolly difficult, I can tell you, and I"ve taken no end of trouble over it."
"Oh, I"m not finding fault!" said Cathy hastily. "I think it"s ever so nice, and you"re a dear boy to do it for me. We might bend the tail down a little--so! That"s better. Now it looks splendid, and we"ll give it a front place in the collection."
"All right!" said d.i.c.k, somewhat mollified. "But you girls seem to think these things are as easy as eating cakes. It takes practice even to skin a sparrow, as you"d soon find out if you"d ever tried your hand at it."
The bullfinch was duly placed in the museum, where it really looked very well. Not long after, however, we began to notice a most peculiar odour in the school-room.
"It"s the flowers!" said Cathy, sniffing at a vase, and throwing the water out of the window. "They always get nasty if you leave them too long."
"It smells to me more like a dead mouse," I declared. "Perhaps one may have had a funeral inside the wall;" and, dropping on my knees, I crept round the room, scenting the skirting-boards like a pointer. In spite of my efforts I was not able to fix the spot, and as Cathy turned out a potful of sour paste which we had forgotten in the cupboard, and found a pile of stale mushrooms in the pocket of George"s coat, which was hanging behind the door, we came to the conclusion that it might be either of these.
But the odour did not improve, and by the next day it had become almost unbearable. Even the boys perceived it, and that is saying something. We all went round the room, sniffing in every corner, and trying to find the cause of offence, till at length Edward flung open the door of the cabinet.
"It"s your beastly bullfinch!" he declared. "Take the wretched thing away! It"s only half-cured, and smells like a tan-yard! Whew!"
Poor d.i.c.k was rather crest-fallen, especially as Edward made it a subject of chaff for many days; and he grew so huffy about it, that for some time we did not dare to mention either birds or the collection in his presence. He came home one day, however, bubbling over with laughter.
"I"ve a ripping museum joke for you!" he said. "Beats your old bullfinch into fits!"
"What"s that?" we enquired.
"Why, I was down the village with the governor this morning, and we dropped into old Mrs. Grainger"s. I was telling her a yarn or two about the Babe"s crocodile"s egg, and so on, and she turned round to a drawer, and fished out a piece of pink coral. "If you like things from furrin"
parts," says she, "I"ll give you this. My sailor son brought it home from Singapore on his last voyage. I"ve heard as coral is all full of insects, but I"ve boiled this piece well in a saucepan, so I reckon it"ll be clean enough now!""
"_Boiled!_" we exclaimed.
"Yes, boiled! To kill the insects, don"t you see?"
"Your imaginative faculties, my dear fellow, are considerable," said Edward. "But you won"t get me to swallow that!"
"Fact, all the same!" said d.i.c.k. "You ask the governor. You"re jealous, old chap, because you can"t glean up humour yourself in the village. The yokels are so taken up with staring at your last new tie, or your immaculate collar, that you don"t get a word out of them. There was old Jacob Linkfield, now, who----"
But at this point of the story Edward went for d.i.c.k, and chased him out of the house and down to the stack-yard. He could occasionally stir his long legs when he considered the "cheek" of the younger ones grew beyond bounds, and, once he was moved, they deemed it prudent to flee before him.
You must not think, however, that we spent the whole of our time at Marshlands with the boys. They were frequently out with their father upon some shooting or fishing expedition, and Cathy and I would potter about the garden or in the fields with "the mater", only too delighted to have the chance of getting her quite to ourselves. A sweeter or truer gentlewoman than dear Mrs. Winstanley it has never been my good fortune to meet. She took me to her kind heart at once, and gave me for the first time in my life that "mothering" which I had so sadly lacked. I have hinted that my aunt did not make too much of me; even her own children did not run to her with their joys and sorrows, and I had never been accustomed to think of her as in any sense a possible companion.
Mrs. Winstanley, on the other hand, was the most delightful of comrades.
She had not forgotten in the very least what it felt like to be young; she could sympathize in all our amus.e.m.e.nts, indeed I think she enjoyed a picnic tea in the woods, or a scramble for blackberries, fully as much as we did ourselves; but she contrived at the same time to make us interested in those intellectual pleasures which were the great resource of her life. Under her guiding hand I made my first efforts at sketching; she taught me the names of the trees and the flowers, of which before I was lamentably ignorant; and a walk to see a cromlech or a stone circle upon the moors was an opportunity for such delightful stories about the early dwellers in our lands, that I became a lover of "antiquities" on the spot. I feel I can never be grateful enough to her for giving me in my childhood that taste for natural history which has been such a joy to me in my after-life. She taught us to use our eyes, and to see the beauty in each leaf and flower and every common thing around us. At her suggestion Cathy and I each began a "Nature Note-Book", in which we recorded all the plants, birds, animals, or insects we met with during our rambles, drawing and painting as many of them as we could.
"It will form a kind of naturalists" calendar," she said. "You must put the dates to all your finds, and in years to come the books will prove very interesting. Never mind whether the sketches are good or bad.
Persevere, and you will soon begin to improve, and the very effort to copy a flower or a b.u.t.terfly will impress its shape and colour upon your minds in a way which nothing else could do."
We waxed very enthusiastic over these note-books, and there was quite a keen compet.i.tion between us as to which should contain the most records.
As we kept them for several years, we naturally had different entries during the holidays we spent apart; and while I was able to sketch gorgeous sea-anemones and madrepores which I found upon the sh.o.r.es of south-country watering-places, Cathy would exult over the coral cups or birds"-nest fungi for which she searched the woods in winter.
Somehow, after my friendship with the Winstanleys I realized that in some subtle way the bond between my father and myself grew and strengthened. In the years which I had spent at my aunt"s, though I had never ceased to love him, we had seemed in a very slight degree to have drifted apart, but since my visit to Marshlands all the old spirit of comradeship returned, and I felt he was even more to me than he had ever been before. I think I must have unconsciously expressed this feeling in my letters, for in his, too, I began to notice a change. He wrote back to me more fully and freely, not as to a child, but as to a friend, telling me his hopes and his difficulties, and the little details of his lonely days, and asking almost wistfully for a full record of all my doings. His grat.i.tude to my kind friends knew no limit, yet I think all the same he felt it hard that he should miss those years of my life when I was receiving my most vivid impressions, and that he must leave to others the care he would so gladly have bestowed upon me himself.
CHAPTER VI
MISCHIEF
"When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war."
The celebrated Dr. Johnson is said to have advocated the theory, "When you meet a boy, beat him! For either he has been in mischief, or he is at present in mischief, or he is about to get into mischief!" In the case of the two younger Winstanley boys, I fear this axiom was only too true, since they sometimes allowed their love of fun to lead them into rather questionable undertakings, and I do not think their neighbours altogether appreciated the many jokes and escapades with which they sought to enliven the holidays.
There resided in the village High Street a certain elderly bachelor, a retired sea-captain, of somewhat autocratic manners and a very great idea of his own importance. d.i.c.k and George had once ventured into his garden in quest of a runaway puppy, and had been met with such a storm of wrath from the fiery old gentleman, who threatened to prosecute them for trespa.s.sing, that they had carried on a kind of feud with him ever since. On the captain"s side, I have no doubt, there were many reasonable grounds of complaint, but the boys, on the other hand, considered themselves to have just cause of grievance. Their enemy had been seen deliberately to wipe off the treacling mixture which they had smeared upon the trees to attract moths, though the said trees were situated on the public highway, and not on his private property; he had put an impa.s.sable fence of barbed wire round the particular field where specimens of the Clifden Blue might occasionally be captured, and he had clipped his brambly hedge, allowing the p.r.i.c.kles purposely to fall and remain in the cinder-path below, though he knew it was the short cut by which they bicycled from Marshlands to the railway-station.
"Hoped we should puncture our tyres, no doubt!" said d.i.c.k indignantly.
"By sheer good luck I saw them in time, and we carried our machines the whole length of the lane. But it was a sneaking trick to play, and we"ll be even with him. We owe him a good long score now, and I have it in my mind to just jolly well pay him out."
Needless to say, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Winstanley were aware of these fell designs against old Captain Vernon, with whom they had always managed to keep on excellent terms of neighbourly good-will, and, knowing full well that their schemes would be promptly forbidden if they ventured to divulge them, the boys seized the opportunity when "the mater" and "the governor" were out at a dinner-party to carry into execution their plan of revenge.
Edward declined altogether to be a party to the deed.
"Beastly bad form, I call it!" he yawned. "You don"t catch me leaving a decent arm-chair to go ragging an antiquated old fossil of a sea-captain. As for you two girls, I suppose you can do as you like, but don"t let the mater catch you at it, that"s all!"
And, stretching out his long legs on a second chair, he took up a copy of Punch, and resigned himself to ease and comfort.
"That"s all jolly well for the fifth form," said d.i.c.k, "but it"s a little too good for us chaps. We"re off now, and if Cathy and Phil like to join the show, they can, and if they don"t, they may stop at home and hem dusters."
It was extremely naughty of us, but we wanted so much to see what happened; so we thought if we followed the boys at a discreet distance we should not be exactly aiding and abetting, and yet we should come in for a full share of all that went on.