Marys Meadow | Page 4

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.
One does not, as a rule, begin to go to bed by letting down one's hair,
and taking off one's shoes and stockings. But one night I was silly
enough to do this, just to see if I looked (in the mirror) at all like the
picture of Rosalba in the Rose and the Ring. I was trying to see my feet
as well as my hair, when I heard Arthur jumping the three steps in the
middle of the passage between his room and mine. I had only just time
to spring into the window-seat, and tuck my feet under me, when he
gave a hasty knock, and bounced in with his telescope in his hand.
"Oh, Mary," he cried, "I want you to see the Old Squire, with a
great-coat over his evening clothes, and a squash hat, marching up and
down Mary's Meadow."
And he pulled up my blind, and threw open the window, and arranged
the telescope for me.
It was a glorious night. The moon was rising round and large out of the

mist, and dark against its brightness I could see the figure of the Old
Squire pacing the pathway over Mary's Meadow.
Saxon was not there; but on a slender branch of a tree in the hedgerow
sat the nightingale, singing to comfort the poor, lonely old Man in the
Moon.
CHAPTER II.
Lady Catherine is Mother's aunt by marriage, and Mother is one of the
few people she is not rude to.
She is very rude, and yet she is very kind, especially to the poor. But
she does kind things so rudely, that people now and then wish that she
would mind her own business instead. Father says so, though Mother
would say that that is gossip. But I think sometimes that Mother is
thinking of Aunt Catherine when she tells us that in kindness it is not
enough to be good to others, one should also learn to be gracious.
Mother thought she was very rude to her once, when she said, quite out
loud, that Father is very ill-tempered, and that, if Mother had not the
temper of an angel, the house could never hold together. Mother was
very angry, but Father did not mind. He says our house will hold
together much longer than most houses, because he swore at the
workmen, and went to law with the builder for using dirt instead of
mortar, so the builder had to pull down what was done wrong, and do it
right; and Father says he knows he has a bad temper, but he does not
mean to pull the house over our heads at present, unless he has to get
bricks out to heave at Lady Catherine if she becomes quite unbearable.
We do not like dear Father to be called bad-tempered. He comes home
cross sometimes, and then we have to be very quiet, and keep out of the
way; and sometimes he goes out rather cross, but not always. It was
what Chris said about that that pleased Lady Catherine so much.
It was one day when Father came home cross, and was very much
vexed to find us playing about the house. Arthur had got a new
Adventure Book, and he had been reading to us about the West Coast

of Africa, and niggers, and tom-toms, and "going Fantee;" and James
gave him a lot of old corks out of the pantry, and let him burn them in a
candle. It rained, and we could not go out; so we all blacked our faces
with burnt cork, and played at the West Coast in one of the back
passages, and at James being the captain of a slave ship, because he
tried to catch us when we beat the tom-toms too near him when he was
cleaning the plate, to make him give us rouge and whitening to tattoo
with.
Dear Father came home rather earlier than we expected, and rather
cross. Chris did not hear the front door, because his ears were