The Slowcoach | Page 5

the time and remembered
birthdays.
Next to Uncle Chris came Mr. Scott, who was a famous author and a
very good cricketer on the lawn, and Mr. Lenox, who was private
secretary to a real lord, and therefore had lots of time and money. Both
Mr. Scott and Mr. Lenox were bachelors, as the best friends of families
always are; unless, of course, their wives are invalids.
Gregory, who was more social than Robert, also knew one policeman,
one coachman, three chauffeurs, and several Chiswick boatmen
extremely intimately. Robert's principal friend outside the family was a
bird stuffer in Hammersmith; but he does not come into this story.
The Avories did not go to boarding school, or, indeed, to any school in
the ordinary way at all; Mrs. Avory said she could not spare them.
Instead they were visited every day except Saturdays by Mr. Crawley
and Miss Bingham, who taught them the things that one is supposed to
know--Mr. Crawley taking the boys in the old billiard room, and Miss
Bingham the girls in the morning room. At some of the lessons--such
as history --they all joined. The classes were attended also by the
Rotherams, the doctor's children, who lived at "Fir Grove," and Horace
Campbell, the only son of the vicar. So it was a kind of school, after all.

Horace Campbell had always intended to be a cowboy when he grew
up, but a visit to a play called "Raffles" was now rather inclining him to
gentlemanly burglary. William Rotheram, like Gregory, leaned towards
flying; but Jack Rotheram voted steadily for the sea, and talked of little
but Osborne.
Mary Rotheram played with a bat almost as straight as "Plum" Warner's,
and she knew most of the old Somersetshire songs-- "Mowing the
Barley," and "Lord Rendal," and "Seventeen come Sunday"--by heart,
and sang them beautifully. Gregory, who used to revel in Sankey's
hymns as sung by Eliza Pollard, the parlourmaid, now thought that the
Somerset music was the only real kind. Mary Rotheram had a snub
nose and quantities of freckle and a very nice nature.
"The Gables" had a large garden, with a shrubbery of evergreens in it
and a cedar. It was not at all a garden-party garden, because there was a
well-worn cricketpitch right in the middle of the lawn, and Gregory had
a railway system where the best flowers ought to be; but it was a
garden full of fun, and old Kink, the gardener, managed to get a great
many vegetables out of it, too, although not so many as Collins thought
he ought to.
Collins was the cook, a fat, smiling, hot lady of about fifty, who had
been with Mrs. Avory ever since she married. Collins understood
children thoroughly, and made cakes that were rather wet underneath.
Her Yorkshire pudding (for Sunday's dinner) was famous, and her
horse radish sauce was so perfect that it brought tears to the eyes.
Collins collected picture postcards and adored the family. She had
never been cross to any of them, but her way with the butcher's boy and
the grocer's boy and the fishmonger's boy was terrible.
She snapped their heads off (so to speak) every morning, and old Kink
spent quite a lot of his time in rubbing from off the backdoor the awful
things they wrote about her in chalk.
The parlourmaid was Eliza Pollard, who had red hair and a kind heart,
but was continually falling out with her last young man and getting

another. She told Hester all about it. Hester had a special knack of
being told about the servants' young men, for she knew also all about
those of Eliza Pollard's predecessors.
The housemaid was Jane Masters, who helped Eliza Pollard to make
the beds. Jane Masters did not hold with fickleness in love--in fact, she
couldn't abide it--and therefore she was steadily true to a young man
called 'Erb, who looked after the lift at the Stores, and was a particular
friend of Gregory's in consequence. No man who had charge of a lift
could fail to be admired by Gregory.
Finally--and very likely she ought to have come first--was Runcie, or
Mrs. Runciman, who had not only been the nurse of all the Avories, but
of Mrs. Avory before them, when Mrs. Avory was a slip of a girl
named Janet Easton. Runcie was then quite young herself, and why she
was suddenly called Mrs. no one ever quite knew, for she had never
married. And now she was getting on for sixty, and had not much to do
except sympathize with the Avories and reprove the servants. She had a
nice sitting room of her own, where she sat comfortably every
afternoon when such work as she did was done, and received visits
from her pets,