Petunia Again: Sketches

PREFACE.

CONTENTS

Petunia Again — Welcome — The Backblocks — The Aeroplane — From the Chinese — Adopting Emily — Twocott — A Country Writer — The Hypnotist — Tin Lizzie — The Show — The Haircut — Scipio — Bill Boundy — An Angry Man — Alcibiades — News — Amusing Daisy — Obiit — The Drought

Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with which they take our cheers and let us say "Thank you." It relieves us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile, and are far from looking foolish when they "get up to reply." The speeches aren't always very easy to reply to, either, because what we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course. Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this spontaneous outburst in one speech:—"By Jo, we are glad to see you." It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour, and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back, actually in the house in their own room at that moment!

Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though there are some we shall never see.

Too many town people are prepared to talk as though "the outbacks" were anywhere beyond a 20-mile radius of the G.P.O. When you are really in the backblocks you turn the washing machine for your hostess, make complicated arrangements for keeping the ants out of the sugar, help "separate," cut out some jumpers for the children on the newest town pattern, and take your afternoon ride on the poison-cart attending to bunny. Once or twice a week you go into the township for the mail. You bath frugally because all the water is caught off the roof or in the dam, and you empty the tub on to what garden there is, for none can be wasted.

I pity all healthy women who never have a chance to go sometimes where life, though not easy, is simple and self-contained and wholesome, where the work cannot be delegated to the baker or the small goods man or the dressmaker just because the weather is hot or you don't feel up to the mark. Without this you cannot feel all the joy of being thoroughly essential to your family—nor its occasional terror. Only very fine women can live such a life properly, though. You have to find your happiness and your amusement in the life itself, not in some artificial amusement patched on for the moment. You have to find it in permanent and ultimate things, in love and work and effort and hope and helpfulness, not in "The Pictures" or a variety show.

I don't pretend not to enjoy a variety show myself when I'm in town, and I don't pretend that Petunia is in the backblocks, but it is in the country, and I am quite sure that country life is as enjoyable as a town one, though not every one feels it. Anyone can take a pill, but not all can make one, nor even pick out the ingredients from a lot of herbs and drugs presented to them.

I suppose that is the trouble with Joyce Wickhams. She has gone to work in town so that she can go to the Pav. and Henley Beach on band nights as often as she likes. I hope she will miss feeding the swill to the grunting, shoving, greedy pigs, miss the leisurely cows, miss the glow of health that you feel—without thinking about it—as you canter out for them. And Saturday's tennis is never quite so nice in town as it is in the country, where you know everyone on the courts very well, are going to sing with most of them at the concert in March, and went with them to the working bee at the school last week. We shall miss Joyce. She was the best housemaid we've ever had in our dialogues, and the most popular waitress at tea meetings. Of course she will laugh a great deal at Charlie Chaplin, and the town entertainments will be very clever, but the fun that is made for you doesn't make so much of your mind and heart laugh as the fun that you help make yourself.

The excitement continues. We've had rain and we've seen the aeroplane! In fact they came together. On Sunday it was given out in the churches that between 10 and 11 on Monday, Capt. Butler would fly over Petunia and drop Peace Loan literature. Farmers immediately decided that one morning off couldn't make much difference to a bad season, and mothers and daughters exchanged glances in which the washing was postponed. When the school mistress had it announced in the Twocott chapel that there would be no lessons next morning, the children's flushed faces were as good as cheers. Even the Hobbledehoy, who had seen the great sight in town, of course, was not so blasé as he pretended.

On Monday motors and traps and waggons poured into Petunia through driving wind and rain. Pedestrians with umbrellas struggled against the blast. I don't quite know what we expected. Perhaps we thought the aeroplane would only be visible from the main street, or that it would land there, or that the literature would, and in any case, we all wanted to take our excitement in company. We lined up for shelter in the lee of shops and houses. Opinions differed. Some thought the Institute the best site, some the post-office, and some plumped for the vicinity of the Recreation Ground, as affording a clear view and a suitable place for an airman to descend (or drop out) after a spiral or a nose-dive.

The Postmaster suggested that the weather might be too ... but we shut him up for a croaker, and poddled about exchanging anticipations and chaffing young Jones, who was "look-out" to report the arrival to the expectant school. A stockman drifted in with a herd of yearlings, and we watched him zig-zag them resignedly past the groups of traps and people. Wet ruts gleamed in some fitful sunshine along the straight road stretching between green paddocks into the moist distance. There came an unexpected sound overhead, and the school children burst along the street with decorous hilarity. Something we had seen in pictures emerged from the grey and glided overhead, and into the distant grey again, "like a spoggy in the sky," as young Allen poetically observed.

It was in sight for quite four minutes.

Half an hour later we were fairly certain that there were to be no nose-dives, no spirals, not even any literature. We snubbed the Postmaster, and closed in on the Institute, where the chairman of the district tried to focus our attention on the Peace Loan, and make us feel we had not come out for nothing. Then laughing people turned their collars up round their ears, climbed into buggies, and shook the reins. "Gid-dup."

A few people despise poetry; many more speak respectfully of it only because they think they ought to, not because they, personally, understand it or even appreciate it. Of course, it is quite easy to enjoy a poem without understanding its technique, its rhyme, rhythm, and so on, or without being able to say in what, apart from the form, it differs from prose. "Can't you feel it?" is often the sufficient answer, in the words of a certain professor of classics.

The following fragment from the Chinese makes us feel that it is poetry, though the translator cannot convey to us the poetic form of the original.

PO CHU-I STARTS ON A JOURNEY EARLY IN THE MORNING.

"More than a thousand years have elapsed since that journey," says the Times reviewer, "and nobody knows the words of that 'faint song,' or the nature of those 'sombre thoughts,' but we are just as intimately acquainted with Po Chu-I as if he had enlarged by the page on his emotional complexities.... Chinese poetry aims to induce a mood rather than to state a thought.... Po Chu-I's sorrows and joys and placid reveries hover in the mind after the book is closed, and that—and not the number of startling remarks made—is the test of a poem's value."

To-day or a thousand years ago, China or Australia, it is all the same. You and I have made journeys like that, and can share the poet's mood. We have arisen early and crept about by lantern-light, we have let ourselves out on to a road that lies white under a cold moon, and have thrilled and hasted in the chill air. The first solemn joy gave place to gloom as the heralding darkness enveloped the world. And then we felt the dawn-breeze among the gum trees, and heard the creek rustle through the water-cress. A dog barked, a bird peeped, and the first pink cloud floated in the brightening sky. And then the world woke up, the magpies and the farmyards and the pumping engine, and we were glad that we were afoot and off, and a little proud about it.

And a thousand years ago an old, old Chinaman sang our mood for us, and lo! it was poetry. And because we have felt it all for ourselves, though we did not know how to tell about it, what he says plays on our minds like music, and we live the mood again.

"Seen that fine tabby in the woodhouse?" enquired Joshua.

"She's got a beautiful white chest," agreed Hob, "and that loose skin and soft fur like old M'Glusky."

"And a pink nose," said Daisy.

"And her eyes are amber. Do let's adopt her," said I.

"Yes, let's," chorused the others—all except Marjorie, who prefers mousetraps, and says that where one or two cats are gathered together, or something, there is always an awful noise. However, we determined to have that tabby.

Have you ever tried to adopt a duchess? A duchess in reduced circumstances? Then you don't know what we have been through with Emily. (We call her Emily after Miss Fox-Seton, the "large, placid creature, kind rather than intelligent," who became Marchioness in one of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett's books.) Emily is a cat of character. She didn't want to be adopted. She didn't mind renting our woodheap, but preferred not to have to meet the family. She would keep herself to herself, thank you. She used to sit, serene and dignified, blinking in a sunbeam among the roots, lifting her white bosom and gently kneading the ground. If you offered her food she seemed to put up her lorgnettes at you, and it wasn't any good leaving the saucer and going round the corner. When you came back Emily was gone, and the food wasn't.

She certainly impressed us. We built up all sorts of legends around her. Her disdain for food and her calm refusal either to accept our advances, to withdraw from her place, or to be seen hurrying at any time, seemed so very aristocratic. And then how she kept up appearances! Marjorie scarcely took the same view as the rest of us, especially after Emily so haughtily snubbed the milk she had offered herself. She said she didn't believe she was a duchess at all; more of a peroxide barmaid about Emily, if you asked her, a minx with a bust who put on airs. And a few nights later she said she wouldn't have cats encouraged about the place. She said she believed Emily was the cause of that jazz party on the lawn in the moonlight.

Emily jazz! Never!

"Adopting Emily" became the favourite diversion of our leisure. In the end it was very mortifying, very mortifying indeed. We were all sitting on our heels round the woodheap coaxing Emily, and Emily as usual was barely tolerating our presence, too proud to withdraw, when Mr. Wickhams came across the paddocks to borrow another axe.

"Well, I'm blowed!" said he; "so this is where our old cat goes. She's only been home for meals since the wife turned her out of the hat-box."

Yes, what we took for dignity was sulks, and her aristocratic superiority to food was due, to put it bluntly, to a full stomach. Mr. Wickhams handsomely forgave us for trying to abduct his best mouser as he stretched a long arm into the wood and hauled her off by the scruff of the neck. Such an indignity for Emily.

Driving out to Buxton on Wednesday afternoon, I picked up little Jennie Elliott walking home from Twocott.

"Do you go to school already?" I exclaimed.

"Oh, I've been going a long time—ever since Christmas. We got a nice teacher. She is always good to us—unless she can't help it; and we are always good to her, unless we can't help it." Dear understanding little mite. "All of us are in the second grade nearly." "All of us" have now learnt to sing, and Jennie is always out early—unless she is kept in.

She held on tightly to the side of the dog-cart and looked about the country while she prattled out the gossip of the school from the point of view of a six-year-old, and I felt a swelling of gratitude to the wonderful teacher who keeps eight grades busy and happy and proud of themselves, and convinced that she is proud of them, too! "All of us" have a very nice time at Twocott, and are learning to be considerate and tolerant and self-controlled, as well as the more formal lessons, and all taught by a mere woman who understands the art of discipline without a stick.

A writer in The Times Literary Supplement complains of the dearth of good novels of country life. The modern author, he asserts, claps the story on to any county, irrespective of the spirit of the place. He takes a tourist's trip to Cornwall or Yorkshire, and makes a book out of it, though his dialogue was never heard on land or sea, flowers bloom together whose seasons never met, and his pitiful town thinness of mind is visible alike in what he sees and in what he fails to see.

Against these degenerate moderns the letter sets Richard Doddridge Blackmore, and regrets that all his novels but one are neglected by an undiscriminating or too hasty generation.

Now it is the virtue of country libraries that, though only the feeblest of modern novels may find a way there, the best of the old linger on their shelves long after they have been ejected from more pretentious places. And so, while this letter was still fresh in my mind, in our Institute at Petunia, rubbing sides with volumes by Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Braddon, I came across "Cripps the Carrier," whose title page proclaimed it to be "by the author of Lorna Doone." I took it home, despite my doubt, as I eyed its yellow pages and heavy print, that I should pay with yawns for my virtuosity.

And then on the very first page I met Dobbin, "the best harse as ever looked through a bridle."

"Every 'talented' man must think, whenever he walks beside a horse, of the superior talents of the horse ... the power of blowing (which no man hath in a comely and decorous form); and last, not least, the final blessing of terminating decorously in a tail.... Scarcely any man stops to think of the many cares that weigh upon the back of an honest horse. Dobbin knew all this, but was too much of a horse to dwell on it. He kept his tongue well under his bit, his eyes in sagacious blinkers, and sturdily up the hill he stepped, while Cripps, his master, trudged beside him."

At the second page I was smiling outright, and knew that not a word of this book would I knowingly skip.

Such is the quality of the writing that not only do we learn to know Zacchary Cripps and his brother Tickus (christened after the third book of the "Pentachook," as they called his sixth brother), his horse Dobbin, and Mary Hookham, "as he was a tarnin' over in his mind," together with Squire Oglander, Lawyer—or "Liar"—Sharp, as Zac addressed him, "wishing to put all things legal," Miranda his wife, and Kit his son, as well as or better than we know our neighbours, but we are all the time falling in love with that sly rogue, that mellow scholar, that lover of a horse and a pretty girl, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Here is a man who knows and loves and smiles over the rustic mind and life, as he knows and loves the trees, the hedges, the ruts, the sunlight, and the frosts, and all the ways of Nature. He is leisurely, and you must be leisurely with him. You must stop to see what he sees, and accompany all his friends on their goings out and comings in, smiling and enjoying with him. He cares more for the telling than for the story; he knows, like Louis Stevenson, that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive."

Oxford and Oxfordshire are the scenes of the story, and we hear more of town than gown, and more of Beckley than either. If the precise critic ask whether it be a novel of character or of place or of plot, the precise critic is a fool. There is the country, with its lanes and hedges and changing seasons, and there are the people who carried and delved and gossiped and wondered, sympathized with the trials of their "betters," and did their duty by parish church and parish "public," "same as Christians ought to." And if you put it squarely to Squire (or Parson?) Blackmore: "Come, now, you don't expect me to believe that Lawyer Sharp actually ... eh?" he will vouchsafe such a Philistine not so much as a wink in reply, though you may catch a quizzical twinkle at a generation too bald-minded to enjoy a hop field because the blossom must be held up on poles.

Blackmore, like Shakespeare, knows every turn of the bucolic's slow, sturdy, tortuous mind; he loved his pauses, the dawning of perception, his easy missing of the point, his superstitions, and his common sense. Read this (it comes in that passage where the escaping Grace Oglander appeals to the Carrier to shelter her from pursuit in his van):

"But missy, poor missy," Cripps stammered out, drawing on his heart for every word, "you was buried on the seventh day of January, in the year of our Lord 1838; three pickaxes was broken over digging your grave by reason of the frosty weather, and all of us come to your funeral! Do 'ee go back, miss, that's a dear! The churchyard to Beckley is a comfortable place, and this here wood no place for a Christian."

And he can paint the brisk homely maids as well as the gaping tongue-tied men.

"Now, sir, if you please. You must—you must," cried Mary Hookham, his best maid, trotting in with her thumbs turned back from a right hot dish, and her lips up as if she were longing to kiss him, to let out her feelings.... "Sir, if you please, you must ate a bit.... 'Take on,' as my mother has often said, 'take on as you must, if your heart is right, when the hand of the Lord is upon you; but never take off with your victuals.'... All of us has our own troubles," said Mary, "but these here pickles is wonderful."

In the affectionate malice of the misadventures into which is plunged Hardenow, that earnest, scholarly Tractarian, there is all the fun of a man who is teasing a beloved and misguided friend. The muscles he is so proud of shall be laughed at, into brambles he shall plunge, and lose his hat and tear his neckcloth into ribbons; in a pig-net shall he be caught, and his athletic legs having struck terror into the mind of Rabbit John, bound with thongs shall he be, and left in an empty pig-stye, the very parlour of pig-styes ("on the floor, where he had the best of it, for odour ever rises"), there to continue his fast for many hours. Pity him not overmuch; "his accustomed stomach but thinks it Friday come again!"

Aye, Blackmore knew man, and maid, and beast—even pig. Lying in this plight, Hardenow sees:

"... a loose board, lifted every now and then by the unringed snout of a very good old sow. Pure curiosity was her motive, and no evil appetite, as her eyes might tell. She had never seen a fellow and a tutor of a college rolling, as she herself longed to do; and yet in a comparatively clumsy way. She grunted deep disapprovement of his movements, and was vexed that her instructions were so entirely thrown away."

Here is a picture of a little child, seen through his hole by the distracted tutor:

"A little child toddled to the wicket gate and laid fat arms against it, and laboured, with impatient grunts, to push it open.... He gazed with his whole might at this little peg of a body, in the distance toppling forward, and throwing out behind the whole weight of its great efforts.... This little peg, now in battle with the gate, was a solid Peg in earnest; a fine little Cripps, about five years old, as firm as if just turned out of a churn. She was backward in speech, as all the little Crippses are; and she rather stared forth her ideas than spoke them. But still, let her once get a settlement concerning a thing that must be done to carry out her own ideas, and in her face it might be seen, once for all, that stop she never would till her own self had done it....

"Taught by adversity (the gate had banged her chubby knees, etc.) she did thus: Against the gatepost she settled her most substantial availability, and exerted it, and spared not. Therewith she raised one solid leg, and spread the naked foot thereof, while her lips were firm as any toe of all the lot, against the vile thing that had knocked her about, and the power that was contradicting her. Nothing could withstand this fixed resolution of one of the far more resolute moiety of humanity. With a creak of surrender the gate gave back; and out came little Peggy Cripps, with a broad face glowing with triumph."

I have told you of Dobbin; I suppose I mustn't detain you to hear about Lawyer Sharp's horse? "A better disposed horse was never foaled; and possibly none—setting Dobbin aside, as the premier and quite unapproachable type—who took a clearer view of his duties to the provider of corn, hay, and straw, and was more ready to face and undergo all proper responsibilities.... He cannot fairly be blamed, and not a pound should be deducted from his warrantable value, simply because he did what any other young horse in the world would have thought to be right. He stared all round to ask what was coming next, he tugged on the bridle, with his fore feet out, as a leverage against injustice, and his hind legs spread wide apart, like a merry thought, ready to hop anywhere." Later he made for Oxford, "where he thought of his oat sieve smelling sweetly, and nice little nibbles at his clover hay, and the comfortable soothing of his creased places by a man who would sing a tune to him."

One of the charms of the book is that it will make you a nuisance to your family; there are so many pictures that you simply must read them, so many phrases they must taste with you, and everything that you do quote seems to be capped and improved upon by something a little further on, and you simply must venture it.

Not a thing does he miss, from ruts (oh, that pæan on ruts! "Everything here was favourable to the very finest growth of ruts. The road had once been made, which is a necessary condition of any masterpiece of rut work; it had then been left to maintain itself, which encourages wholesome development....") to the effects of a hard frost, the borings of the Sirex Gigas, and the tufted undergrad. who tools the "Flying Dutchman" up the streets of Oxford. And nothing would we have him miss.

How can I let my dear friend Richard Blackmore, with his chuckling gossip about Worth Oglander and Grace, Cripps, and the rustics of Oxford and Beckley, fade out of memory on Petunia shelves?

The Round of Gaiety continues. We have just lived through a Sunday School anniversary (with tea meeting), a visit from the hypnotist, and the Show.

The Hobbledehoy (latterly known as Hob) wrote that his father must go to the hypnotic entertainment. He had been with some of the boys from College, and the sight of a respectable schoolmaster under the delusion that he was assisting at a dogfight left him without words to express his joy. On hearing that our new man, Fat Bill Boundy, who has the face of a natural comedian, meant to submit himself for experiment, Joshua decided that a little amusement would cheer Marjorie up, and of course he accompanied her.

Admission turned out to be 2s. 4d. and 3s. 6d.

"But the advertisement said 'Popular Prices,'" protested Joshua.

"That's right," agreed the ticket man, smoothly, "popular with the entertainer."

Joshua says that this was the only joke of the evening. Bill Boundy went up on to the platform all right, but the Great Man only made him twiddle his fingers and roll his eyes. He said that on this occasion he was "mesmerizing but not hypnotizing." Joshua sat up half the night with Jack's Reference Book and the Encyclopædia Britannica, trying to find out the difference. It appears that it consists in the size of the town in which the performance is given.

Our minister bought a "Tin Lizzie"—at least, I'm afraid he passed it off with the old, old joke, "We'll have a Ford now, and a motor after the war." But Tin Lizzie worked harder than any horse, and our minister was well satisfied—except when he forgot to water her, or crank her, or in some way misunderstood her internal organs; and then he called her "The Pesky Thing," and even went so far as to say—I mean, of course, to think—"Dash it."

But a time came when the Pesky Thing had to be cleaned, and oiled, and crawled over, and squirmed under, and taken to pieces, and—and—sermonized over. And our minister was a persevering man, and so were his friends; and they talked and thought and read motors, and captured the local mechanic and a passing amateur and an expert; and finally they got her to go—a little way. Wherefore on Saturday night the minister went to bed happy.

But all the same he had a dream, a nightmare, a hair-raising, heart-stopping nightmare. He dreamed that he was walking to church when he noticed his boots—and they were his motor-cleaning boots, scraped on the heels and worn at the toes and cracked all over. But he was not dismayed; the pulpit would hide them.

And yet a little way, and lo, he had on his head the cap, the greasy, poacher's cap that protected his clerical hairs from the motor-drippings.

"But I can pocket my cap," this imperturbable man comforted himself.

And yet a little further, and it was his coat, his shapeless, sagging, grimy motor-coat.... And now he really was put out, for, as he foresaw,

"I shall have on those trousers in a few minutes!"

And when at last he got to church the sense of doom was upon him, and when he gave out the hymn the organ was out of order.

And they took it to pieces, and cleaned it, and oiled it, and climbed over it and crawled under it....

"Now I see that all things work together for good," dreamed our minister (he was ever an optimist), "for I've got the right togs on for the job."

During the strike our railway supported only three trains a week; for the Show it surpassed itself and ran three on one day, or, rather, two and a dog-box. But they were all full, and I do think the crowd enjoyed itself, or at any rate Marjorie's prize cake and cream puffs, which were carried off surreptitiously. Joshua says that the judging was very unsatisfactory. His two-tooth did not get a prize. Marjorie, on the other hand, considers that in the cooking and dairy sections the most exemplary fairness was shown.

In the general excitement of meeting Pete Wigglesby, whom we haven't seen for years, Joshua gave his order for a milking machine, although the drought has set in again. Marjorie wishes he would want to show off to some other old friend, and order a new house. "One without cement floors, and with no step down into the kitchen," she says, plaintively. "And with a bathroom," puts in Hob.

Peterborough Show comes next, and I fancy our men will mob it. For one thing, it is such a good opportunity to get their hair cut. You see, we are short of barbers in Petunia, and any excursions are eagerly seized. When the District Schools Picnic was held at Glenelg there were queues outside the hairdressers there till late in the afternoon, and it was considered that the managers of our fair made a great coup when they ran a saloon as a sideshow. By the end of the evening Dicky Conlon was getting to be quite an expert hair-cutter. There was a little disturbance when Joe Wickhams saw himself in the glass, but Constable Merritt knocked the razor out of his hand and pulled him off Dicky. After that it was all right, because some one had the presence of mind to take away the mirror.

Joshua couldn't go to Peterborough Show after all, and his hair was awful. Marjorie "could not foresee to what lengths it would go," and advised him to wear it in curling-pins. Joshua begged her to try what she could do with a basin, and finally persuaded her to take a comb and scissors and "put the reaper into the crop." Of course, the machine had to go over it several times, but at last only the stubble remained. She had some difficulty in getting the furrows on one side to meet those on the other, but finally the terrace effect was complete. Windy corner, where the roads meet on top, was a difficult point to negotiate, and Vimy Ridge took some levelling. The razor-work was particularly fine, and Joshua deserves the V.C. Marjorie was rather dashed by her failure to sell him a bottle of hair-restorer; she urged that it might help check the growth.

Daisy is still after a pet whose usefulness she can justify as a potential mouse-catcher, but our disappointment with the Duchess has made us humbler and more discreet. This time we asked a neighbour for the gift of his apparently superfluous black kitten.

"'Taint mine," said he; "it belongs to my old Nosey. She had it in the haystack, and I have never been able to catch it to drown it. If you can get it you can have it."

"We shan't find any difficulty with Scipio," exulted the Hobbledehoy, home for "month out," "because no one has been feeding him."

"Scipio?" I asked.

"The black kitten," he explained. "What they used to call the little niggers. Good name for a gutter-snipe."

Well, we certainly have no difficulty in getting Scipio into the neighbourhood of nourishment. He (and Nosey his mother, and Miss Perkins his aunt, and the Yellow Peril from up the road) will scud across two paddocks at the sound of our call. At twenty paces, however, Scipio becomes coy. He rubs himself ingratiatingly against his mother, he sniffs towards the food, but won't be wheedled. He may daringly sneak up within six feet to snatch a piece of meat, but he runs off again growling and sticks a paw on it, and turns his eyes towards us, flattening his ears while he eats. By the exercise of great patience and by throwing bits of meat at lessening distances he has even learned to snatch the meat from Daisy's hand, to eat it without moving far, to—no, not to be stroked! At the first touch on his fur he darts to the gate, brings up, turns round, a little ashamed of his fright as he hears Daisy's cooing voice—or, perhaps, still a little hungry!—and stands ready for flight, his tail gallantly up, though, and twitching his muscles confidingly, so that the fur ripples up and down his back in the sunlight. He fixes us with his blue eyes, that are already turning green at the edges, starts forward, checks—and that is as far as we can get with the adopting of Scipio. Poor little gutter-snipe! We shall never tame him. He can't believe in human kindness. The only love he trusts is the warm touch of his mother, and she will cast him off soon, and his kittenhood will be over. Scipio will live as he can on pickings from rubbish heaps and mice in the haystacks and birds in the hedge. But it is Daisy who will be unhappy about it, not Scipio! Luckily, cats are not introspective.

Have I told you about our Bill Boundy? I have a rooted conviction that for a good many people music is simply a noise that they hope will soon stop. The reason why people will hardly ever confess to being unmusical is probably Shakespeare's unfortunate remark:

To me it seems very hard that people should be under a cloud simply because of some defect in their organs of Corti, or some other part of the physical apparatus for hearing the exquisiteness of tune in sound. However, Bill Boundy is undoubtedly musical. He could lean against the wall all day listening to Hob practising. "It makes the skin of my head run tight," he says, ecstatically and in apology, when Joshua motions him stablewards.

Bill is a treasure. I hope Joshua will never sack him irrevocably. He had "a week home to Munta" for Christmas, and is simply bursting with conversation. Most of his anecdotes turn upon his mother, a salty old Cornishwoman. She is a pensioner, but quite properly expects as much courtesy from the officials as if she were any other member of the public.

"I be waiting, my son," was her gentle reminder through the post office window to the negligent back of "some young Jack-a-napes." The new clerk took no notice.

"Didn't 'ee hear, son? I be standing."

"No son of yours," snapped the sensitive youth.

"Must be somebody's son," urged the old lady, calmly, "unless 'ee come out of incubator."

Jack-in-Office is now quite briskly attentive to Bill Boundy's mother.

Bill is filled with admiration and a little malice because John Thomas Trellagan's boy has just qualified as a doctor.

"Fair set up about it, John Tummas be. 'Rayther young, John,' says I. 'Shouldn't like him monkeying with my innards, 'a believe.' 'Aw,' says John Tummas, a terrible obliging man, 'they only practise on quite young children at first, 'a believe.'"

Joshua says Bill is "an ingratiating beggar." Relations were strained because Bill hadn't got the milking machine clean in time, but while they speeded up Bill wheedled Joshua into a good temper. He told him another story of John Tummas Trellagan's boy. He has had his first maternity case. The mother and child are in a bad way, says Bill, but Clarence still hopes to save the father.

Bill always knows all that goes on in the township. Now that paper and string cost so much those who forget to take a cloth for their bread have to pay a halfpenny extra. Bill was there when the butcher took his revenge by charging the baker's little messenger for the paper he wrapped the dog's meat in. Thank goodness, everyone in Petunia can take a joke.

I had chosen "Mary Barton" because Mrs. Gaskell wrote it, and "Joan and Peter" because no blue stocking with a care for her reputation can afford to admit ignorance of whatever book happens to be Wells's penultimate, (or at any rate ante-penultimate), and I felt that I deserved some champagne after this solid-looking fare. I looked round the shelves gloomily, despairing of finding anything frivolous in the scanty stock from which in Petunia we draw for our week's entertainment. "Pickwick Papers"—delightful, but too old a friend. "Three Men in a Boat"—also past its first youth. "Galahad Jones"—the very best of its kind, but then we only returned it last week. "Fatima"—um-m. Well, it had the plain cover of a self-respecting publisher; good print, plenty of conversation, titled folk, a yacht. It sounded frivolous enough. I took it.

I do not regret my choice, though my pleasure was scarcely due to the writer. There is no need to tell you the story. It was about a French-Arabian young lady dressed in a burnous (yes!) and coins, who married a tuberculous Scotch peer, and fell out with a deep-dyed villain (also of the peerage), and loved a doctor, the Bayard of his profession and the saintliest scientist who ever fell into the devilish hands of Arabian bandits agitating (apparently) for the eight hour day, only to be rescued by the lady in the burnous. No, the fun was not in the story, entertaining as its author's luxurious enjoyment of herself undoubtedly was; the fun was entirely due to reading in the wake of an angry man with a pencil, who took the whole thing seriously.

He began on the first page. "A baronet would not be called 'Lord,'" he reproves mildly. You could see his feeling; purely irritation with the printers. But as the story progressed it became clear that it was not the compositor who was at fault. "The authoress evidently does not understand titles," he snarls. "Earl Harben would not be referred to as 'Lord Eric.'" He slashes his pencil through "the Lady Eric," and bang goes "her grace." Fury nearly obliterates the "gh" in "straightened circumstances." Next he reasons with the misguided person who has been adjudged worthy of the dignity of print (my own idea is that a doting husband paid for the whole thing himself). "Not a burgomaster and a maire," he pleads; "not in the same town. One is German, the other French." Other anomalies he passes with a mere flick of the pencil, an exasperated sniff, as it were. I stuck to the yarn solely for the pleasure of savouring his hot fury, his cold despair, his pleading, his rage.

"The Presbyterians"—the infuriated man nearly dug through the page—"do not pray for the dead."

And then came the (for me) sad page whereafter comment ceased. He had pounced on an exotic phrase.

"Pure Yankee!" he exclaims, triumphantly, and all is forgiven. I parted from him with sorrow.

His conclusion was wrong, of course, as I could prove if I met him. No one ought to accuse an American woman of not understanding the British peerage!

The pet problem is solved! A chum has presented Hob with a small black pup, and, as Hob found to his disgust that even Prefects can't keep dogs at school, he brought him home at the Michaelmas holidays.

"What is his name?" demanded Daisy.

"The Dam Dog," replied Hob.

"What!" ejaculated Marjorie.

"The Dam Dog. Oh, it's all right, mother. It means 'dog that washes in a dam.' D.A.M., you know."

"Thank you, Hob. I know you go to college, but I can spell 'dam' myself—both ways. You must find some other name for your dog."

The little fellow kept us all awake the night Hob left, and Joshua remarked in the morning that he thought Marjorie might now be more willing to let the name stand. However, Hob wrote to say that he had decided upon Alcibiades.

This time it was Joshua who put his foot down. He said that, if ever the time should come (which he doubted) when the dog was useful with sheep he was not going to make a fool of himself by shouting "Alcibiades."

So now "his name is Alcibiades," as Daisy explains, "but we call him Peter."

Peter is a lovable little chap. He barks, prances, pounces, worries, with all the energy possible to a little barrel-shaped body that has only just ceased to wobble when it walks. Yesterday the police-constable called with news of our missing cow. Peter took the opportunity to bite his trousers and pull his boot laces, and then rolled over and over in an ecstacy of self-importance.

Don't apologize for sending "no news, only views, blended with a cold in the head." I never can see why letters should be newsy.

"There is nothing to write about; I am not doing anything," people say. But if they are not doing they are thinking, and our thoughts are often more interesting to our friends than events, which very likely have little connection with ourselves at all. I've an idea that the best correspondents, like the best essay writers, are the egoists.

I am not one of the best letter-writers, however. In fact, I feel distinctly newsy. There is always something going on in Petunia. For instance, some more of our boys have returned from the war. We were pleased! A turkey was dressed in honour of one, and then the date of arrival was several times postponed. The problem of problems is—how long will a turkey keep even in (home-made) cold storage this weather? Any little unusual smell was greeted anxiously with, "I hope that isn't the turkey!"

Twocott gave a strawberry fête and magic lantern in honour of its soldiers, only the strawberries didn't come, and the lantern was missing. Still, the evening was a great success; there was so much more time to talk and play.

But the policeman's wife has had the most excitement. Her husband was away, and she was awakened by strange noises. At first she thought it was smothered laughter, and then she thought it was curses (not smothered); presently there was a crash and a groan. In the shadow of the lane opposite a writhing mass of men bore something stealthily into the darkness. Our policeman's wife is a heroine. She resolved not to desert the children, and buried her head in the bedclothes. In the morning Mrs. Odgers, coming over to borrow some dripping, was full of the kindness of the men who had moved the piano into her new house on their way home from the political meeting at Buxton.

I do wish all girls took a course of home nursing. I've been nursing Daisy with one hand and reading up the subject with the other, so to speak. I can now sponge the patient with almost no exertion to her and without letting her get cold, at least, not very; and I can change the sheets without moving her from the bed. When Daisy gets better perhaps Marjorie or Joshua will give me a turn, just so that I can perfect my art. Daisy liked the cap I wore to protect my hair; it decided her to be a nurse herself some day. But the best subject for amusing the restless little soul was Peter—well, then, Alcibiades. I told Joshua about the beautiful echo that would reverberate "over the downs" if he called "Alcibiades," but he said life was too short for elocutionary exercises while you round up sheep. "You mean your temper is too short," observed Marjorie very justly.

Of course, I couldn't have Peter in the room catching scarlatina and spreading infection, but Daisy was never tired of hearing about him. We country people don't keep our animals in the Zoo and visit them once a year. They are part of our life, and we talk about them accordingly. Dobbin, now—but I suppose I mustn't? Well, well, to return to Peter. Sometimes he would stand on a bench under the window and put his paws on the sill, eagerly looking in with his bright black eyes, his ears pricked, his ecstatic tail hopefully suggesting a walk. And then bones. He loves bones, nice old gamey ones, disinterred with excitement and later buried again with earnest care. The ambition of his heart is to gnaw them inside. He prances in proudly, tail up, head up, bone on one side, and then at the reprimand, the transparent bubble of his innocence pricked, he turns round (laughing, doubtless, at his discomfiture), and makes for his mat—when he doesn't defy you from under the table. And to see him tugging at an apron-string, legs set, eyes bulging!

"What else does he do?" enquires Daisy solemnly. I can't think of anything else, and I say lamely:

"Well, once he barked at a beetle."

Peter is dead.

Daisy is inconsolable. He was such an engaging little fellow.

He was the only dog that Marjorie ever allowed inside.

He is buried under the apple tree where he used to forage so busily for bones.

Last birthday Hob got a rather special penknife. This disposed him to be generous with his third and oldest.

"If I give you this," he meditated to little Allen from next door, "I suppose you will cut yourself with it?"

"I wouldn't," protested Allen. Hob gave it to him. Last week when Daisy and I were going to the library Allen came prancing up to us.

"I've got a cut finger," he exclaimed, triumphantly. Then, suddenly remembering, "But I didn't do it with Hob's knife." He danced backward on his toes so as to face us as we walked on.

"I've been to town," offered Daisy.

"See the aererplane? See the Cave? See Father Christmas?" he demanded.

"Yes," bragged Daisy.

"I ain't," said Allen, wistfully.

And the harvest is so scanty that Father Christmas will have to be very frugal if he is to come at all to the homes of some working men. Petunia looks very sad, bare and brown and dusty. The sparrows hop about with parched open beaks, waiting their turn when the tap drips, and on Sundays the dejected draught horses stand about in the trampled dust while the hot wind soughs through the stunted shrubs, and the sun blazes on bare paddocks, and shimmers on the iron roofs. In winter it is different. The light shines clearly on gay green crops and whitens the curving blades, and the horses mosey companionably along the roadsides, nibbling the grass, twitching humorous nostrils, gambolling clumsily and shaking their bell-bottomed pasterns, screaming with laughter when sportively bitten by a friend. Oh, man and beast love Petunia in winter! But droughts really ought not to be allowed. It is moving to think of ill-fed cattle and disheartened workers.

writes Browning. In the good seasons I find this advice inspiring. When the rebuff begins it seems less so. And when one thinks of the returned soldiers who are only getting three bushels to the acre (not even enough for seed!) one remembers with tears that it is easier to die for a country than to live for it. "Beginning again" after the years at the war takes resolution and courage, the willingness to take risks, and the patience not to take them hastily, that are as true tests of manhood as any they had abroad.