Milly and Olly | Page 7

wild-roses, some pink and some white, and long pools with yellow irises growing along the side; and sometimes the train went rushing through a little village, and they could see the little children trotting along to school, with their books and slates tucked under their arms; and sometimes they went along for miles together without seeing anything but the white-and-brown cows in the fields, and the great mother-sheep with their fat white lambs beside them. The sun shone so brightly, the buttercups were so yellow, the roses so pink, and the sky so blue, it was like a fairy world. Olly and Milly were always shouting and clapping their hands at something or other, for Milly had grown almost as wild as Olly.
Sh-sh-sh-sh went the train, getting slower and slower till at last it stopped altogether.
"Bletchley, Bletchley!" shouted Olly, jumping down off the seat.
"No, my boy," said his father, catching hold of him, "we shall stop five more times before we get to Bletchley; so don't be impatient."
But at last came Bletchley, and the children were lifted out into the middle of such a bustle, as it seemed to Milly. There were crowds of people at the station, and they were all pushing backward and forward, and shouting and talking.
"Keep hold of me, Olly," said Milly, with an anxious little face. "Oh, Nana, don't let him go!"
But nurse held him fast; and very soon they were through the crowd, and father had put them safe into their new train, into a carriage marked "Windermere," which would take them all the way to their journey's end.
"That was like lions and bears, wasn't it, mother?" said Olly, pointing to the crowd in the station, as they went puffing away. Now, "lions and bears" was a favourite game of the children's, a romping game, where everybody ran about and pretended to be somebody else, and where the more people played, and the more they ran and pushed and tumbled about, the funnier, it was. And the running, scrambling people at the station did look rather as if they were playing at lions and bears.
And now the children had a long day before them. On rushed the train, past towns and villages, and houses and trains. The sun got hotter and hotter, and the children began to get a little tired of looking out of window. Milly asked for a story-book, and was soon very happy reading "Snow White and Rose Red." She had read it a hundred times before, but that never mattered a bit. Olly came to sit on nurse's knee while she showed him pictures, and so the time passed away. And now the train stopped again, and father lifted Olly on his knee to see a great church far away over the houses, and taught him to say "Lichfield Cathedral." And then came Stafford; and Milly looked out for the castle, and wondered whether the castles in her story-books looked like that, and whether princesses and fairy godmothers and giants ever lived there in old times.
After they had left Stafford, Olly began to get tired and fidgety. First he went to sit on his father's knee, then on mother's, then on nurse's--none of them could keep him still, and nothing seemed to amuse him for long together.
"Come and have a sleep, Master Olly," said nurse. "You are just tired and hot. This is a long way for little boys, and we've got ever so far to go yet."
"I'm not sleepy, Nana," said Olly, sitting straight up, with a little flushed face and wide-open eyes. "I'm going to keep awake like father."
"Father's going to sleep, then," said Mr. Norton, tucking himself up in a shady corner; "so you go too, Olly, and see which of us can go quickest."
When Olly had seen his father's eyes tight shut, and heard him give just one little snore--it was rather a make-believe snore--he did let nurse draw him on to her knee; and very soon the little gipsy creature was fast asleep, with all his brown curls lying like a soft mat over nurse's arm. Milly, too, shut her eyes and sat very still; she did not mean to go to sleep, but presently she began to think a great many sleepy thoughts: Why did the hedges run so fast? and why did the telegraph wires go up and down as if they were always making curtsies? and was that really mother opposite, or was it Cinderella's fairy godmother? And all of a sudden Milly came bump up against a tall blue mountain that had a face like a man, and cried out when she bumped upon it!
"Crewe, I declare," exclaimed father, jumping up with a start. "Why, Olly and I have been asleep nearly an hour! Wake up, children, it's dinner-time."
Nurse had to