The Holiday Round | Page 5

to procure a flame, and placed in the ashes the pemmican or whatever it
is that falls to your rifle."
"Well, I did go out to look for pemmican this morning, but there were
none rising."
"Then I shall have my ham sandwich hot."
"Bread, butter, cheese, eggs, sandwiches, fruit," catalogued Dahlia, as
she took them out; "what else do you want?"
"I'm waiting here for cake," I said.

"Bother, I forgot the cake."
"Look here, this picnic isn't going with the swing that one had looked
for. No pemmican, no cake, no early Norman church. We might almost
as well be back in the Cromwell Road."
"Does your whole happiness depend on cake?" asked Myra scornfully.
"To a large extent it does. Archie," I called out, "there's no cake."
Archie stopped patting the car and came over to us. "Good. Let's
begin," he said; "I'm hungry."
"You didn't hear. I said there WASN'T any cake--on the contrary, there
is an entire absence of it, a shortage, a vacuum, not to say a lacuna. In
the place where it should be there is an aching void or mere hard-boiled
eggs or something of that sort. I say, doesn't ANYBODY mind, except
me?"
Apparently nobody did, so that it was useless to think of sending
Archie back for it. Instead, I did a little wrist-work with the
corkscrew....
"Now," said Archie, after lunch, "before you all go off with your
butterfly nets, I'd better say that we shall be moving on at about
half-past three. That is, unless one of you has discovered the slot of a
Large Cabbage White just then, and is following up the trail very
keenly."
"I know what I'm going to do," I said, "if the flies will let me alone."
"Tell me quickly before I guess," begged Myra.
"I'm going to lie on my back and think about--who do you think do the
hardest work in the world?"
"Stevedores."
"Then I shall think about stevedores."

"Are you sure," asked Simpson, "that you wouldn't like me to show you
that signalling now?"
I closed my eyes. You know, I wonder sometimes what it is that makes
a picnic so pleasant. Because all the important things, the eating and the
sleeping, one can do anywhere.

IV.--IN THE WET

Myra gazed out of the window upon the driving rain and shook her
head at the weather.
"Ugh!" she said. "Ugly!"
"Beast," I added, in order that there should be no doubt about what we
thought. "Utter and deliberate beast."
We had arranged for a particularly pleasant day. We were to have
sailed across to the mouth of the--I always forget its name, and then up
the river to the famous old castle of-of-no, it's gone again; but anyhow,
there was to have been a bathe in the river, and lunch, and a little
exploration in the dinghy, and a lesson in the Morse code from
Simpson, and tea in the woods with a real fire, and in the cool of the
evening a ripping run home before the wind. But now the only thing
that seemed certain was the cool of the evening.
"We'll light a fire and do something indoors," said Dahlia.
"This is an extraordinary house," said Archie. "There isn't a single book
in it, except a lot of Strand Magazines for 1907. That must have been a
very wet year."
"We can play games, dear."
"True, darling. Let's do a charade."

"The last time I played charades," I said, "I was Horatius, the front part
of Elizabeth's favourite palfrey, the arrow which shot Rufus, Jonah, the
two little Princes in the Tower, and Mrs Pankhurst."
"Which was your favourite part?" asked Myra.
"The front part of the palfrey. But I was very good as the two little
Princes."
"It's no good doing charades, if there's nobody to do them to."
"Thomas is coming to-morrow," said Myra. "We could tell him all
about it."
"Clumps is a jolly good game," suggested Simpson.
"The last time I was a clump," I said, "I was the first coin paid on
account of the last pair of boots, sandals, or whatnot of the man who
laid the first stone of the house where lived the prettiest aunt of the man
who reared the goose which laid the egg from which came the goose
which provided the last quill pen used by the third man Shakespeare
met on the second Wednesday in June, 1595."
"He mightn't have had an aunt," said Myra, after a minute's profound
thought.
"He hadn't."
"Well, anyhow, one way and another you've had a very adventurous
career, my lad," said Archie. "What happened the last time you played
ludo?"
"When I played clumps," put in Simpson, "I was the favourite spoke of
Hall Caine's first bicycle. They