The Holiday Round | Page 5

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 guessed Hall Caine and the bicycle and the spoke very quickly, but nobody thought of suggesting the favourite spoke."
Myra went to the window again, and came back with the news that it would probably be a fine evening.
"Thank you," we all said.
"But I wasn't just making conversation. I have an idea."
"Silence for Myra's idea."
"Well, it's this. If we can't do anything without an audience, and if the audience won't come to us, let's go to them."
"Be a little more lucid, there's a dear. It isn't that we aren't trying."
"Well then, let's serenade the other houses about here to-night."
There was a powerful silence while everybody considered this.
"Good," said Archie at last. "We will."
The rest of the morning and all the afternoon were spent in preparations. Archie and Myra were all right; one plays the banjo and the other the guitar. (It is a musical family, the Mannerings.) Simpson keeps a cornet which he generally puts in his bag, but I cannot remember anyone asking him to play it. If the question has ever arisen, he has probably been asked not to play it. However, he would bring it out to-night. In any case he has a tolerable voice; while Dahlia has always sung like an angel. In short, I was the chief difficulty.
"I suppose