Chapter IV: Part 4

Oh, it would be as fresh a sight
As ever yet was seen,
If buttercups were pink and white
And roses blue and green.

KITTEEN

BY

MARGARET KENNEDY

I sat beside the ingle-nook,
The fire was glowing;
The pot was bubbling on the hook,
The wind was blowing.
In the shadows of the room
Ghosts were hiding;
From the furthest, deepest gloom
They came gliding.
At the back of me I knew
Crowds were creeping.
Through the house the storm-wind blew,
Flames went leaping,
Awful shadows on the wall
Set me screaming.
Close at hand came Someone’s call:
“Sure she’s dreaming!
What have you seen?
Kitteen!
Tell us, what have you seen?”

In the brown bog by the lake
There are stacks of drying peat;
When by chance that way I take,
Past I run with flying feet;
For once when, wandering carelessly,
I came into that lonely place,
I watched a peat stack close to me
And saw it had a wrinkled face!
All old women sitting round,
Each one in a long brown cloak;
They gazed and gazed upon the ground
With eyes like stones, and never spoke.
Then I turned my back and fled
Up our hill, with stumbling feet;
In a doorway Someone said:
“She’s as white as any sheet!
What did you see?
Kitteen machree!
Tell us, what did you see?”

Gilbert

CLEMENCE DANE

I am the aunt of Annabel. Annabel is coming next Friday to the birthday party she ought to have had a month ago; but she had measles instead. I am anxious for Annabel to enjoy herself. Whom shall I ask to meet her?

Annabel is five—a gracious-mannered five, with a smooth bobbed head of red hair, eyes like lilacs, and a generously curved mouth. She is a darling. She is also a devil. She never allows me or anyone else a quiet moment with her mother when she is in the room: indeed, she owns her parents and regards all visitors as her perquisites. She owns also, and can use with disastrous effect on my borders, a scooter and a tricycle. She can adjust the wireless set and listen in at her pleasure to Bournemouth, Cardiff or London. She swears at the dog in broad Devon, and has her ideas about her frocks. But she cannot read or tie her own shoes or tell the time.

Annabel is coming to tea on Friday. How am I to keep her amused? Shall I invite Philip Collins, that hard-working child, proprietor of stickle-backs, my particular friend? Will there be anything left of Philip if I do—or of Annabel? Philip is seven. With only a year or so between them they ought to get on. And yet, how did I feel towards seven when I was five? Across the white magic-lantern circle of my memory a shadow flits, a leggy, olive-green shadow, with fur at its neck and wrists, and I recognise Gilbert, and pause.

Annabel is so much more sophisticated and so much more of a baby than we were ever allowed to be, that the Gilbert adventure could hardly happen to her. She would say she didn’t like him and be done with it. And yet—suppose she didn’t! Suppose she suffered him in silence like her aunt before her! I do want Annabel to enjoy herself.

You must not think that there was any harm in Gilbert. He was, I see now, a nice, polite little boy. My Aunt Angela said so. He was as nice a boy, I daresay, as Philip, who is—perhaps—to make Annabel’s acquaintance next Friday. But he was long and, as it was a fancy-dress ball, his mother had dressed him in greenery-yallery tights, and a doublet with moleskin at the neck and wrists. Now, when you are no older than Annabel and own a live mole which you keep in the ring-dove’s cage, you do not feel friendly to people who wear moleskin. (No, I don’t know what happened to the ring-dove, though I remember that she lived for some time in the kitchen in a straw-coloured wicker-work cage, and was incessantly laying eggs that wouldn’t hatch and croo-rooing over them in a lamentable voice which made the nursery feel that the whole bitter business was the nursery’s fault.)

It is not too much to say that from the moment I set eyes upon Gilbert I felt for him that unreasoning sick dislike of which only a child is capable, and which it never attempts to explain. I never said a word to my Aunt Angela about Gilbert, though I noted him with a prophetic shudder as I followed her across the shining, slippery floor. Indeed, nobody could help noticing Gilbert. It was not only that he was so much longer than anybody else, so prominent among the Joan of Arcs and Pierrots and Geishas, but that he was such a pervasive dancer: he seemed to be behaving beautifully with everybody at once. There was a horrible fascination in his smiling efficiency: he wasn’t shy like everyone else: he didn’t mind what he did: and he did it well. He was a handsome boy too, for my Aunt Angela said so. Indeed, I can best fix him for you by recalling the fact that when I saw Lewis Waller come upon the stage as Robin Hood I instantly, and for the first time in fifteen years, remembered Gilbert.

Before I could pull on my white silk mittens, my aunt (I knew she would) had caught Gilbert and introduced him to me, and he wrote his name on my programme and his own, and his moleskin wrist—his mole must have been an older and oilier mole than mine—rubbed against my bare hand. In the frantic subsequent attempts to scrub off the feel, I spilled water down my new frock, my fancy-dress of yellow satin petals over a green satin skirt, with three green satin leaves dangling from the neck; for I, in that hour, was a primrose.

But washing my hands and drying my frock only took up a dance and a half: Gilbert and his Berlin Polka were still to be faced.

I had an idea. I would anticipate Gilbert: I would have a partner of my own. I marked one down, a rosy, bewildered little girl in sparkles: a Snow-white—a Fairy queen—what did I care? I gave her her orders; for she was only four. She was to look out for me when number seven began. She was to refuse to dance with anyone else. She was dancing the Berlin polka with me—did she understand?—with me: and if a green boy with moleskin on his wrists asked her where I was, well—there I wasn’t! Did she quite understand?

I was still passionately explaining the situation when the music of number six struck up, and her partner, a Father Christmas smaller than herself, jogged her away. I can still see so clearly the bunchy little figure—we were not so particular about the cut of our clothes as is Annabel’s generation—and the alarmed dark eyes and hot cheeks as she looked back at me over her winged shoulder. As for me, I had to put in the perilous time somehow. I hid.

I found a beautiful place to hide in, a room with cane chairs and palms, and one or two screened recesses with two chairs and a table in each. I sat me down in the only empty recess and listened to the music, and wondered whether Gilbert had begun to look for me yet. Soon a young lady with bare shoulders and a young gentleman with an eye-glass arrived, looked in, departed, and shortly returned again. It was quite evident that they wanted my refuge. I wasn’t going to let them have it. I was terrified of them both, but I was still more terrified of Gilbert.

Said the young gentleman:

“What are you doing here?” and he called me “little girl!”

Said I, firmly, but I was on the edge of tears:

“I am waiting for my partner,” and felt that I lied, for I was not exactly waiting for Gilbert.

“Oh, indeed!” said the young gentleman, and stared again, and whispered to the young lady with the white shoulders, and the young lady whispered back. You cannot think how miserable I felt. They went away at last; but they, and my lie—a lie was a lie in those days—had ruined my haven. I slipped out as the music stopped, and instantly the young gentleman and the young lady got up from two chairs under a palm and sat down behind my screen, while—oh horror!—Gilbert’s green and questing length crossed and re-crossed the lighted swirling space on the other side of the draped doorway. I knew—who better?—whom he sought. I backed into the dark corner formed by the wall and the other side of the screen, too much occupied with Gilbert’s next move to attend to the murmurs on the other side of it. But the sitters-out were sensitive; or I, effacing myself as much as possible, must have pushed against the screen. Slowly, over the top, rose the head of the young gentleman. He stared down at me reproachfully and I, in a paralysis of embarrassment, stared up at him. You cannot think how tall the screen seemed, and how terrible the face of the young gentleman to the eyes of five. Nothing was said. How long he was prepared to stare at me I do not know, for his eye-glass was more than I could bear: at that moment even Gilbert was easier to face. I sidled back into the ballroom, worming my way as self-effacingly as possible in and out between mothers and empty chairs, till a familiar glitter caught my eye. It was my partner, my illegal partner, so soft, so rosy, so cosy, so blessedly harmless, so very much smaller than I. She was not pleased to see me (I realise now that I must have been as awful to her as Gilbert to me) but what did that matter? I grasped her hurriedly by a hand and a wing:

“One, two, three,” I prompted: and we put our feet into the second position. But fate was looking after the little girl in sparkles, not after me.

“My dance, I think.” Gilbert, cool, easy, adequate, even remembered to bow. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” he said and he put out mole-skinny hands.

“I’m dancing with _her_,” I muttered. It was my last throw. But at that a new voice interposed:

“Oh, Mary, you mustn’t take the little girl away from her partner!” And the fairy queen, inexpressible relief in her eyes, pulled her hand out of mine and retired upon her mother.

I danced with Gilbert.

The last straw was hearing my Aunt Angela telling my mother, in the cab coming home, that it was pretty to see how the child had enjoyed herself.

Now I wonder how Annabel would have dealt with Gilbert? Her childhood is not my childhood. I read _Pickwick_ at five, while Annabel is satisfied with _Teddy Tail_: that fancy-dress ball was my first party, while Annabel goes to dances twice a week. Annabel’s emotions could never have been in the least like mine. And yet, five years old in the eighteen-nineties is nearer five years old in the nineteen-twenties than five years old will ever be to a contemporary aunt. If I ask my nice Philip Collins to tea—such a handsome boy!—such good manners!—how am I to be certain that I am not inflicting a Gilbert upon Annabel? On the other hand, Annabel might have liked Gilbert. He was a popular person that evening: and Annabel has never kept moles.

Annabel does not think me young. She asked me yesterday if I had ever spoken to Queen Elizabeth; but she likes to hear what I did in that Palæolithic age when I was little. I will tell her about Gilbert when I tuck her up to-night, and see what she says.

Jack and His Pony, Tom

H. BELLOC

Jack had a little pony, Tom.
He frequently would take it from
The stable where it used to stand
And give it sugar with his hand.
He also gave it oats and hay
And carrots twenty times a day
And grass in basketfuls and greens
And swedes and mangels: also beans;
And patent foods from various sources
And bread—which isn’t good for horses—
And chocolate and apple-rings,
And lots and lots of other things
The most of which do not agree
With Polo Ponies such as he,
And all in such a quantity
As ruined his digestion wholly
And turned him from a Pono Poly
—I mean a Polo Pony—into
A case that clearly must be seen to,
Because he swelled and swelled and swelled.
Which, when the kindly boy beheld,
He gave it medicine by the pail
In malted milk, and nutmeg ale,
And yet it only swelled the more
Until its stomach touched the floor;
And then it heaved and groaned as well
And staggered, till at last it fell
And found it could not rise again.
Jack wept and prayed—but all in vain.
The pony died, and, as it died,
Kicked him severely in the side.

MORAL

Kindness to animals should be
Attuned to their brutality.

Tom and His Pony, Jack

H. BELLOC

Tom had a little pony, Jack:
He vaulted lightly on its back
And galloped off for miles and miles,
A-leaping hedges, gates and stiles,
And shouting “Yoicks!” and “Tally-Ho!”
And “Heads I win!” and “Tails below!”
And many another sporting phrase.
He rode like this for several days,
Until the pony, feeling tired,
Collapsed, looked heavenward and expired.
His father made a fearful row.
He said, “By Gum! You’ve done it now!
Here lies, a Carcase on the ground,
No less than five and twenty pound!
Indeed, the value of the beast
Would probably have much increased.
His teeth were false; and all were told
That he was only four years old.
Oh! Curse it all! I tell you plain
I’ll never let you ride again.”

MORAL

His father died when he was twenty,
And left three horses—which is plenty.

“Pigtails
Ltd.”

WALTER DE LA MARE

How such an odd and curious notion had ever come into Miss Rawlings’s mind, not even Miss Rawlings herself could have said. When had it come? She could not answer even that question either. It had simply stolen in little by little like a beam of sunshine into a large room.

Not of course into an empty room, for Miss Rawlings had many things to think about. She was by far the most important person in the Parish, and everyone—from Archdeacon Tomlington and his two curates, Mr. Moffat and Mr. Timbs, down to little old Mrs. Ort the hump-backed charwoman who lived in the top attic of a cottage down by Clopbourne—or, as they called it, Clobburne—Bridge, everyone knew how _practical_ she was.

But once that sunny beam had begun to steal into Miss Rawlings’s mind and into her life, it had lightened up with its precious gold everything that was there. It was nevertheless a fantastic notion, simply because it could not possibly be true. How could Miss Rawlings ever have lost a little girl if there had never been any little girl to lose? Yet that exactly was Miss Rawlings’s idea. It had flitted into her imagination like a nimble, bright-feathered bird. And once it was really there, she never hesitated to talk about it; not at all.

“My little girl, you know,” she would say with a little emphatic nod and a pleasant smile on her broad face. Or rather, “My little gal”—for she always pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Sal—the short for Sarah. This, too, was an odd thing; for Miss Rawlings had been brought up by her parents with the very best education, and seldom mispronounced even such words as Chloe or Psyche or epitome or misled. And so far as I know—which is not very far—and apart from shall and pal and Hal, there is not a single word of one syllable in our enormous English language that is pronounced like Sal; for Pall Mall, of course, is pronounced Pell Mell. Still, Miss Rawlings did talk about her little girl, and she called her, her little gal.

It never occurred to anybody in the Parish—not even to Mr. Timbs—to compare the Little Gal to a gay little bird or to a beam of sunshine. Mrs. Tomlington said indeed that it was merely a bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet. But whether or not, partly because she delighted in bright colours, and partly because, in fashion or out, she had entirely her own taste in dress, there could not be a larger or brighter or flowerier bonnet for any bee to be _in_. Apart from puce silk and maroon velvet and heliotrope feathers and ribbons and pom-poms and suchlike, Miss Rawlings’s bonnets invariably consisted of handsome spreading flowers—blue-red roses, purple pansies, mauve cineraria—a complete little garden for any bee’s amusement. And this bee sang rather than buzzed in it the whole day long.

You might almost say it had made a new woman of her. Miss Rawlings had always been active and positive and good-humoured and kind. But now her spirits were so much more animated. She went bobbing and floating through the Parish like a balloon. Her _interest_ in everything seemed to have first been multiplied by nine, and then by nine again. And eighty-one times anything is a pretty large quantity. Beggars, gipsies, hawkers, crossing-sweepers, blind men positively smacked their lips when they saw Miss Rawlings come sailing down the street. Her heart was like the Atlantic, and they like row-boats on the deep—especially the blind men. As for her donations to the Parochial Funds, they were first doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled.

There was, first, for example, the Fund for giving all the little parish girls and boys not only a bun and an orange and a tree at Christmas and a picnic with Veal and Ham Pie and Ice Pudding in June, but a Jack-in-the-Green on May-day and a huge Guy on November the 5th, with Squibs and Roman Candles and Chinese Crackers and so on. There was not only the Fund for the Delight of Infants of Every Conceivable Description; there was also the Wooden-Legged Orphans’ Fund. There was the Home for Manx and Tabby Cats; and the Garden by the River with the willows for Widowed Gentlewomen. There was the Threepenny-Bit-with-a-Hole-in-It Society; and the Organ Grinders’ Sick Monkey and Blanket Fund, and there was the oak-beamed Supper Room in “The Three Wild Geese” for the use of Ancient Mariners—haggis and toad-in-the-hole, and plum duff and jam roley-poley. And there were many others. If Miss Rawlings had been born in another parish, it would have been a sad thing indeed for the cats and widows and orphans and organ monkeys in her own.

With such a power and quantity of money, of course, writing cheques was very much like just writing in birthday-books. Still you can give too much to any Fund; though very few people make the attempt. But Miss Rawlings was a practical woman. Besides, Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well that charity must at any rate _begin_ at home, so all this time she was keeping what the Ancient Mariners at the “Three Wild Geese” called a “weather eye” wide open for her lost Little Gal. But how, it may be asked, could she keep any kind of an eye open for a lost Little Gal, when she didn’t know what the lost Little Gal was like? And the answer to that is that Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well.

She may not have known where the absurd notion came from, or when, or why; but she knew that. She knew what the Little Gal looked like as well as a mother thrush knows what an egg looks like; or Sir Christopher Wren knew what a cathedral looks like. But as with the Thrush and Sir Christopher, a good many little things had happened to Miss Rawlings first. And this quite apart from the old wooden doll she used to lug about when she was seven, called Quatta.

One morning, for example, Miss Rawlings had been out in her carriage and was thinking of nothing in particular, just daydreaming, when not very far from the little stone bridge at Clobburne she happened to glance up at a window in the upper parts of a small old house. And at that window there seemed to show a face with dark bright eyes watching her. Just a glimpse. I say _seemed_, for when in the carriage Miss Rawlings rapidly twisted her head to get a better view, she discovered either that there had been nobody there at all, or that the somebody had swiftly drawn back, or that the bright dark eyes were just too close-together flaws in the diamond-shaped bits of glass. In the last case what Miss Rawlings had seen was mainly “out of her mind.” But if so, it went back again and stayed there. It was excessively odd, indeed, how clear a remembrance that glimpse left behind it.

Then again, Miss Rawlings, like her great-aunt Felicia, had always enjoyed a weakness for taking naps in the train, the flowers and plumes and bows in her bonnet nodding the while above her head. The sound of the wheels on the iron lines was like a lullaby; the fields trailing softly away beyond the window drowsed her eyes. Whether asleep or not, she would generally close her eyes and at least appear to be napping. And not once, or twice, but three separate times, owing to a screech of the whistle or a jolt of the train, she had suddenly opened them again to find herself staring out (rather like a large animal in a field) at a little girl sitting on the opposite seat, who, in turn, had already fixed _her_ eyes on Miss Rawlings’s countenance. In every case there had been a look of intense, patient interest on the little girl’s face.

Perhaps Miss Rawlings’s was a countenance that all little girls are apt to look at with extreme interest—especially when the owner of it is asleep in the train. It was a broad countenance with a small but powerful nose with a round tip. There was a good deal of fresh colour in the flat cheeks beneath the treacle-coloured eyes; and the hair stood out like a wig beneath the huge bonnet. Miss Rawlings, too, had a habit of folding her kid-gloved hands upon her lap as if she was an image. None the less, you could hardly call it only “a coincidence” that these little girls were so much alike, and so much like the face at the window. And so very much like the real lost Little Gal that had always, it seemed, been at the back of Miss Rawlings’s mind.

Not that there had ever been any kind of a ghost in Miss Rawlings’s family. Her family was far too practical for that; and her mansion was most richly furnished. All I mean is that each one of these little girls happened to have a rather narrow face, a brown pigtail, rather small dark brown bright eyes and narrow hands, and except for the one at the window, they wore round beaver hats and buttoned coats. No; there was no ghost _there_. What Miss Rawlings was after was an absolutely real Little Gal. And her name was Barbara Allan.

This sounds utterly absurd. But so it had come about. For a long time—having talked about her Little Gal again and again to the Archdeacon and Mrs. Tomlington and Mr. Moffat and other ladies and gentlemen in the Parish, Miss Rawlings had had no name at all for her small friend. But one still summer evening, there being a faint red in the sky, while she was wandering gently about her immense drawing-room, she had happened to open a book lying on an “occasional” table. It was a book of poetry—crimson and gilt-edged, with a brass clasp—and on the very page under her nose she had read this line:

“Fell in love with Barbara Allan.”

The words ran through her mind like wildfire. Barbara Allan—it was _the_ name! Or how very like it! An echo? Certainly some words and names _are_ echoes of one another—sisters or brothers once removed, so to speak. Tomlington and Pocklingham, for example; or quince and shrimp; or angelica and cyclamen. All I mean is that the very instant Miss Rawlings saw that printed “Barbara Allan,” it ran through her heart like an old tune in a nursery. It _was_ her Little Gal, or ever so near it—as near, that is, as any name can be to a thing, viz., crocus, or comfit, or shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry.

Now, if Miss Rawlings had been of royal blood and had lived in a fairy-tale; if, that is, she had been a Queen in Grimm—it would have been a quite ordinary thing that she should be seeking a little lost Princess, or badly in need of one. But except that her paternal grandfather was a Sir Samuel Rawlings, she was but very remotely connected with royalty. Still, if you think about it, seeing that once upon a time there were only marvellous Adam and beautiful Eve in the Garden, that is in the whole wide world, and seeing that all of Us as well as all of the earth’s Kings and Queens must have descended from them, _therefore_ all of Us must have descended from Kings and Queens. So too with Miss Rawlings. But—unlike Mrs. Tomlington—she had not come down by the grand staircase.

Since then Miss Rawlings did not live in a fairy-tale nor in Grimm, but was a very real person in a very real Parish, her friends and acquaintances were all inclined in private to agree with Mrs. Tomlington that her Little Gal was nothing but a bee in her bonnet. And that the longer it stayed there the louder it buzzed. Indeed, Miss Rawlings almost began to think of nothing else. She became absent-minded, quite forgetting her soup and fish and chicken and French roll when she sat at dinner. She left on the gas. She signed cheques for the Funds without looking back at the counterfoils to see what she had last subscribed. She gave brand-new mantles and dolmens away to the Rummagers; ordered coals from her fishmonger’s; rode third class with a first class ticket; addressed a postcard to Mrs. Tomfoolington—almost every kind of absent-minded thing you can imagine.

And now she was always searching: even in the house sometimes; even in the kitchen quarters. And her plump country maids would gladly help too. “No, m’m, she ain’t here.” “No, m’m, we ain’t a-seed her yet.” “Lor’, yes’m, the rooms be ready.”

Whenever Miss Rawlings rose from her chair, she would at once peer sharply out of the window to see if any small creature were passing in the street beyond the drive. When she went a-walking, she was frequently all but run over by cabs and vans and phaetons and gigs, because she was looking the other way after a vanishing pigtail. Not a picture-shop, not a photographer’s could she pass without examining every single face exhibited in the window. And she never met a friend, or the friend of a friend, or conversed with a stranger without, sure enough, beginning to talk about Young Things. Puppies or kittens or lambs, perhaps, first, and then gradually on to little boys. And then, with a sudden whisk of her bonnet, to Little Girls.

Long, long ago now she had learnt by heart the whole of “Barbara Allan”:

“... She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_

‘O mother, mother, make my bed!
O make it saft and narrow!
Since my love died for me to-day,
I’ll die for him to-morrow.’”

Oh dear, how sad it was; and you never knew! Could it be, could it be, she cried one day to herself, that the dead, lovely Barbara Allan of the poem had got by some means muddled up in Time, and was in actual fact _her_ Little Gal? Could it be that the maiden-name of the wife of Miss Allan’s father had been Rawlings?

Miss Rawlings was far too sensible merely to wonder about things. She at once enquired of Mr. Moffat (who had been once engaged to her dearest friend, Miss Simon, now no more) whether he knew anything about Barbara Allan’s family. “The family, Felicia?” Mr. Moffat had replied, his bristling eyebrows high in his head. And when, after a visit to the British Museum, Mr. Moffat returned with only two or three pages of foolscap closely written over with full particulars of the ballad and with “biographical details” of Bishop Percy and of Allan Ramsay and of Oliver Goldsmith and of the gentleman who had found the oldest manuscript copy of it in Glamis Castle, or some such ancient edifice, and of how enchantingly Samuel Pepys’s friend, Mrs. Knipp, used to sing him the air—but nothing else: Miss Rawlings very reluctantly gave up all certainty of this. “It still might be my Little Gal’s family,” she said, “and on the other hand it might not.” And she continued to say over to herself with infinite sorrow in her deep rich voice, that tragic stanza:

She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_

And “Oh no! not Woe,” she would say in her heart.

Soon after this, Miss Rawlings fell ill. A day or two before she took to her bed, she had been walking along Laburnum Avenue, and had happened to see the pupils of the Miss Miffinses’ Young Ladies’ Seminary taking the air. Now, the last two and smallest of these pupils—of the Crocodile, as rude little boys call it—were walking arm in arm with the nice English mistress, chattering away like birds in a bush. Both of them were rather narrow little creatures, both wore beaver hats beneath which dangled brown pigtails. It was yet one more astonishing moment, and Miss Rawlings had almost broken into a run—as much of a run, that is, as being of so stout and ample a presence she was capable of—in order to get a glimpse of their faces.

But, alas! and alack! the wrought-iron gates of the school were just round the corner of Laburnum Avenue, and the whole Crocodile had completely disappeared into the great stone porch beyond by the time she had come in sight of the two Monkey-Puzzles on the lawn, and the brass curtain bands to the windows.

Miss Rawlings stood and gazed at these—for the moment completely forgetting polite manners. The hurry and excitement had made her hot and breathless: and the wind was in the east. It dispirited her, and instead of ringing the bell and asking for the Miss Miffinses, she had returned home and had at once written an invitation to the whole school to come to tea the following Sunday afternoon. In a moment of absent-mindedness, however, she left the note on her little rose-wood secretaire beside the silver inkstand that had belonged to Sir Samuel. And two days afterwards—on the Friday, that is, the month being February—she had been seized with Bronchitis.

It was a rather more severe attack than was usual for Miss Rawlings, even in foggy November, and it made Miss Rawlings’s family physician a little anxious. There was no immediate danger, he explained to Nurse Murphy; still care is care. And Miss Rawlings, being so rich and so important to the Parish, he at once decided to invite an eminent Consultant to visit his patient—a Sir James Jolliboy Geoghehan who lived in Harley Street and knew more about Bronchitis (Harley Street being also in a foggy parish) than any other medical man in Europe or in the United States of America (which are not usually foggy places).

Fortunately, Sir James took quite as bright and sanguine a view of his patient as did Miss Rawlings’s family physician. There Miss Rawlings lay, propped up against her beautiful down pillows with the frills all round, and a fine large pale blue-ribboned bed cap stood up on her large head. She was breathing pretty fast, and her temperature, according to both the gentlemen’s thermometers, was 102.6.

A large copper kettle was ejecting clouds of steam from the vast cheerful fire in the vast brass and steel grate, with the Cupids in the chimneypiece. There were medicine bottles on the little table and not only Nurse Murphy stood grave but brave on the other side of the bed, but, even still more Irish Nurse O’Brien also. Now, the more solemn _she_ looked the more her face appeared to be creased up in a gentle grin.

Miss Rawlings panted as she looked at them all. Her eye was a little absent, but she too was smiling. For if there was one thing Miss Rawlings was certain to do, it was to be cheerful when most other people would be inclined to be depressed. As she knew she was ill she felt bound to be smiling. She even continued to smile when Sir James murmured, “_And_ the tongue?” And she assured Sir James that though it was exceedingly kind of him to call it wasn’t in the least necessary. “I frequently have bronchitis,” she explained, “but I never die.” Which sounded a little like “rambling.”

When Sir James and the family physician had gone downstairs and were closeted together in the gilded Library, Sir James at once asked this question: “What, my dear sir, was our excellent patient remarking about a Miss Barbara Allan? Has she a relative of the name?”

At this Miss Rawlings’s family physician looked a little confused. “No, no; oh dear no,” he exclaimed. “It’s merely a little fancy, a caprice. Miss Rawlings has a notion there is a little girl belonging to her somewhere—probably of that name, you know. Quite harmless. An aberration. In fact, I indulge it; I indulge it. Miss Rawlings is a most able, sagacious, energetic, philanthropic, practical, generous, and—and—humorous lady. The fancy, you see, has somehow attached itself to the _name_ Barbara Allan—a heroine, I believe, in one of Sir Walter Scott’s admirable fictions. Only that. Nothing more.”

Sir James, a tall man, peered down at Miss Rawlings’s family physician over his gold pince-nez. “I once had a patient, my dear Dr. Sheppard,” he replied solemnly in a voice a good deal deeper but not so rich as Miss Rawlings’s, “who had the amiable notion that she was the Queen of Sheba and that I was King Solomon. A _most_ practical woman. She left me three hundred guineas in her will, for a mourning ring.” He thereupon explained (in words that his patient could not possibly have understood, but that Dr. Sheppard understood perfectly), that Miss Rawlings was in no immediate danger and that she was indeed quite a comfortable little distance from Death’s Door. Still, bronchitis _is_ bronchitis; so let the dear lady be humoured as much as possible. “Let her have the very best nurses, excellent creatures; and all the comforts.” He smiled as he said these words, as if Dr. Sheppard was a long-lost brother. And he entirely approved not only of the nice sago puddings, the grapes, the delicious beef-juice (with toast _or_ a rusk), the barley water and the physic, but of as many Barbara Allans as Miss Rawlings could possibly desire. And all that he said sounded so much like the chorus of “Yeo, ho, ho,” or “Away to Rio,” or “The Anchor’s Weighed,” that one almost expected Dr. Sheppard to join in.

Both gentlemen then took their leave, and Dr. Sheppard having escorted Sir James to his brougham (for this was before the days of machine carriages), the two nurses retired from the window and Miss Rawlings sank into a profound nap.

In a few days Miss Rawlings was much, much, much better. Her temperature was 97.4. Her breathing no more than twenty-four or five to the minute—at most. The flush had left her cheeks, and she had finished three whole bottles of medicine. She devoured a slice from the breast of a chicken and said she enjoyed her sago pudding. The nurses _were_ pleased.

Now, naturally, of course, Miss Rawlings’s illness increased her anxiety to find Barbara Allan as quickly as ever she could. After all, you see, we all of us have only a certain number of years to live, and a year lasts only twelve calendar months, and the shortest month is only twenty-eight days (excluding Leap Year). So if you want to do anything badly it is better to begin at once, and go straight on.

The very first day she was out in Mr. Dubbins’s invalid chair she met her dear friend Mr. Moffat in Combermere Grove, and he stood conversing with her for a while under the boughs of almost as wide a spreading chestnut-tree as the village blacksmith’s in the poem. Mr. Moffat always looked as if he ought to have the comfort of a sleek, bushy beard. If he had, it is quite certain it would have wagged a good deal as he listened to Miss Rawlings. “What I am about to do, my dear Mr. Moffat, is advertise,” she cried, and in such a powerful voice that the lowest fronds of the leafing chestnut-tree over her head slightly trembled as they hung a little listlessly on their stalks in the spring sunshine.

“Advertise, my dear Felicia?” cried Mr. Moffat. “And what for?”

“Why, my dear old friend,” replied Miss Rawlings, “for Barbara Allan to be sure.”

Mr. Moffat blinked very rapidly, and the invisible beard wagged more than ever. And he looked hard at Miss Rawlings’s immense bonnet as if he actually expected to see that busy bee; as if he even feared it might be a Queen Bee and would produce a complete hive.

But after bidding him good-bye with yet another wag of the bonnet and a “Yes, thank you, Dubbins,” Miss Rawlings was as good as her word. She always was. Three days afterwards there appeared in the _Times_, and in the _Morning Post_, and in the _Daily Telegraph_, and five days later, in the _Spectator_, the following:

WANTED as soon as possible, by a lady who has lost her as long
as she can remember, a little girl of the name (probably) of
Barbara Allan, or of a name that _sounds_ like Barbara Allan.
The little girl is about ten years old. She has a rather
three-cornered shaped face, with narrow cheek-bones, and bright
brown eyes. She is slim, with long fingers, and wears a pigtail
and probably a round beaver hat. She shall have an _exceedingly_
happy home and Every Comfort, and her friends (or relatives)
will be amply rewarded for all the care and kindness they have
bestowed upon her, for the first nine years or more of her life.

You should have seen Miss Rawlings reading that advertisement over and over. Her _Times_ that morning had a perfume as of the spices of Ambrosia. But even Miss Rawlings could not have hoped that her advertisement would be so rapidly and spontaneously and abundantly answered. The whole day of every day of the following week her beautiful wrought-iron gates were opening and shutting and admitting all kinds and sorts and shapes and sizes of little girls with brown eyes, long fingers, pigtails and beaver hats, _about_ ten years of age. And usually an Aunt or a Step-mother or the Matron of an Orphanage or a Female Friend accompanied each candidate.

There were three genuine Barbara Allans. But one had reddish hair and freckles; the second, curly flaxen hair that refused to keep to the pigtail-ribbon into which it had been tied; and the third, though her hair was brown, had grey speckled eyes, and looked to be at least eleven. Apart from these three, there were numbers and numbers of little girls whose Christian name was Barbara, but whose surname was Allison or Angus or Anson or Mallings or Bulling or Dalling or Spalding or Bellingham or Allingham, and so on and so forth. Then there were Marjories and Marcias and Margarets, Norahs and Doras, and Rhodas and Marthas, all of the name of Allen, or Allan or Alleyne or Alyn, and so on. And there was one little saffron-haired creature who came with a very large Matron, and whose name was Dulcibella Dobbs.

Miss Rawlings, with her broad bright face and bright little eyes, smiled at them all from her chair, questioned their Aunts and their Stepmothers, and their Female Friends, and coveted every single one of them, including Dulcibella Dobbs. But you _must_ draw the line somewhere, as Euclid said to his little Greek pupils when he sat by the sparkling waves of the Ægean Sea and drew triangles in the sand. And Miss Rawlings felt in her heart that it was kinder and wiser and more prudent and proper to keep strictly to those little girls with the three-cornered faces, high cheek-bones, “really” bright brown eyes and with truly appropriate pigtails. With these she fell in love again and again and again.

There was no doubt in the world that she had an exceedingly motherly heart, but very few mothers could so nicely afford to _give it rein_. Indeed, Miss Rawlings would have drawn the line nowhere, I am afraid, if it had not been for the fact that she had only ten thousand pounds or so a year.

There were tears in her eyes when she bade the others good-bye. And to everyone she gave not one bun, not one orange, but a _bag_ of oranges and a _bag_ of buns. And not merely a bag of ordinary denia oranges and ordinary currant buns, but a bag of Jaffas and a bag of Bath. And she thanked their Guardianesses for having come such a long way, and would they be offended if she paid the fare? Only one was offended, but then her fare had cost only 3_d._—2_d._ for herself, and 1_d._ (half price) for the little Peggoty Spalding she brought with her. And Miss Rawlings paid _her_ sixpence.

She kept thirty little ten-year-olds altogether, and you never saw so many young fortunate smiling pigtailed creatures so much alike. And Miss Rawlings, having been so successful, withdrew her advertisements from the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_ and the _Daily Telegraph_ and the _Spectator_, and she bought a most beautiful Tudor house called Trafford House, with one or two wings to it that had been added in the days of Good Queen Anne, and William and Mary, which stood in entirely its own grounds not ten miles from the Parish boundary. The forest trees in its park were so fine—cedars, sweet chestnuts, and ash and beech and oak—that you could only get a glimpse of its chimneys from the entrance to the drive.

Things _are_ often curious in this world, and coincidences are almost as common as centipedes. So Miss Rawlings was more happy than surprised when, on looking over this mansion, she counted (and to make sure counted again) exactly thirty little bedrooms, with some larger ones over for a matron, a nurse, some parlour-maids, some housemaids, some tweeny-maids and a boy to clean the button-boots and shoes. When her legal adviser explained to her that this establishment, what with the little chests-of-drawers, basins and ewers, brass candlesticks, oval looking-glasses, mahogany beds, three-legged stools, dimity curtains, woolly rugs, not to speak of chiffoniers, what-nots, hot-water bottles, soup ladles, and so on and so forth; not to mention a uniform with brass buttons for the man with whiskers at the park gate, would cost her at least six thousand a year, that bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet buzzed as if indeed it _was_ a whole hive gone a-swarming.

“Well, now, my dear Mr. Wilkinson,” she said, “I made a little estimate myself, being a _business_ woman, and it came to £6,004 10_s._ 0_d._ How reasonable! I shall be over four pounds in pocket.”

So, in a few weeks everything was ready; new paint, new gravel on the paths, geraniums in the flower-beds, quilts as neat as daisies on a lawn on the mahogany beds, and the thirty Barbara Allans sitting fifteen a side at the immensely long oak table (where once in Henry VIII’s time monks had eaten their fish on Fridays), the matron with the corkscrew curls at the top and the chief nurse in her starched cap at the bottom. And Miss Rawlings, seated in the South bow-window in an old oak chair with her ebony and ivory stick and her purple bonnet, smiling at her Barbara Allans as if she had mistaken Trafford House for the Garden of Eden.

And I must say every single pigtail of the complete thirty bobbed as merrily as roses in June over that first Grand Tea—blackberry jelly, strawberry jam, home-made bread, plum cake, the best beef-dripping for those who had not a sweet or a milk tooth, Sally Lunns, heather honey, maids-of-honour, and an enormous confection of marchpane, with cupids and comfits and silver bells and thirty little candles standing up in the midst of the table like St. Paul’s Cathedral on the top of Ludgate Hill in the great city of London. It was a lucky thing for the Thirty’s insides that Grand Teas are not every-day teas.

And so, when all the thirty Pigtails had sung a Latin grace put out of English by Mr. Moffat and set to a tune composed by a beloved uncle of Miss Rawlings, who also was now no more, the Grand Tea came to an end. Whereupon the Thirty (looking themselves like yet another Crocodile with very fat joints) came and said good night to Miss Rawlings, though some of them could scarcely speak. And as Miss Rawlings knew that not _all_ little girls like being kissed by comparative strangers, she just shook hands with each, and smiled at them as if her motherly heart would almost break. And Dr. Sheppard was Medical Adviser to the thirty little Pigtailers, and Mr. Moffat came every other Sunday to hear their catechisms.

And this was the order of the day with the Pigtails in their home. At half-past seven in Summer, and at nine in Winter, the boy in buttons rang an immense bell, its clapper tied round with a swab of cotton-wool, to prevent it from clanging too sonorously. This great quiet bell was not only to waken from their last sweet dreams the slumbering Pigtails in their little beds, but to tell them they had yet another half-hour between the blankets before they had to get up. Then, hair-brushes, tooth-brushes, nailbrushes, as usual. Then, “When morning gilds the sky,” and breakfast in the wide white room with the primrose curtains looking out into the garden. And if any Pigtail happened to have been not quite so good as usual on the previous day, she was allowed—if she asked for it—to have a large plateful of porridge, with or without salt, for a punishment. No less than ninety-nine such platefuls were served out in the first year—the Pigtails were so high-spirited. Still, it can be imagined what a thirty-fold sigh of relief went up when breakfast on December 31st was over and there hadn’t been a hundredth.

From nine _a.m._ to twelve _p.m._ the Pigtails were one and all exceedingly busy. Having made their beds they ran out into the garden and woods: some to bathe in the stream, some to listen to the birds, some to talk and some to sing; some to paint and some to play, and some to read and some to dance, and some just to sit; and some, high up in a beech-tree, to learn poems, to make up poems and even to read each other’s. It all depended on the weather. The sun shone, the rooks cawed, the green silken leaves whispered; and Miss Rawlings would stand looking up at them in their venturous perch as fondly as a cat at its kittens. There was not at last a flower or a tree or an insect or a star in those parts—or a bird or a little beast or a fish or a toadstool or a moss or a pebble that the little Pigtails did not know by heart. And the more they knew them the more closely they looked at them, and the more closely they looked at them the more they loved them and the more they knew them—round and round and round and round.

From twelve to one there were “Lessons”; then dinner, and tongues like jackdaws raiding a pantry for silver spoons. In the afternoon those who went for a walk towards the stranger parts, went for a walk. Some stayed at home in a little parlour and sang in chorus together like a charm of wild birds. Some did their mending and darning, their hemming and feather-stitching, and some did sums. Some played on the fiddle, and some looked after their bullfinches and bunnies and bees and guinea-pigs and ducks. Then there were the hens and the doves and the calves and the pigs to feed, and the tiny motherless lambs, too (when lambs there were) with bottles of milk. And sometimes of an afternoon Miss Rawlings would come in and sit at a window just watching her Pigtails, or would read them a story. And Dr. Sheppard asseverated not once, but three times over, that if she went on bringing them sweetmeats and candies and lollipops and suckets to such an _extent_, not a single sound white ivory tooth of their nine hundred or so would be left in the Pigtails’ heads. So Miss Rawlings kept to Sundays.

At five was tea-time: jam on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; jelly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; and both on Sundays. From six to seven there were “Lessons,” and when the little Pigtails were really tired, which was always before nine, they just slipped off to bed. Some of them had munched their supper biscuits and were snug in bed indeed even before the rest had sung the evening hymn. And the evening hymn was always “Eternal Father”—for being all of them so extremely happy they could not but be “in peril on the deep.” For happiness in this world may fly away like birds in corn, or butterflies before rain. And on Sundays they sang “Lead, kindly light” too, because Miss Rawlings’s mother had once been blessed by the great and blessed Cardinal Newman. And one Pigtail played the accompaniment on her fiddle, and one on the sweet-tongued viola, and one on the harpsichord; for since Miss Rawlings had read “Barbara Allan” she had given up pianofortes. And then, sleepy and merry and chattering, they all trooped up to bed.

So this was their Day. And all night, unseen, the stars shone in their splendour above the roof of Trafford House, or the white-faced moon looked down upon the sleeping garden and the doves and the pigs and the lambs and the flowers. And at times there was a wind in the sky among the clouds; and at times frost in the dark hours settled like meal wheresoever its cold brightness might find a lodging. And when the little Pigtails awoke, there would be marvellous cold fronds and flowerets on their windowpanes, and even sometimes a thin crankling slat of ice in their water-jugs. On which keen winter mornings you could hear their teeth chattering like monkeys cracking nuts. And so time went on.

On the very next June 1, there was a prodigious Garden Party at Trafford House, with punts on the lake and refreshments and lemonade in a tent in the park, and all the Guardianesses and Aunts and Stepmothers and Matrons and Female Friends were invited to come and see Miss Rawlings’s little Pigtails. And some brought their sisters, and some their nieces and nephews. There were Merry-go-Rounds, Aunt Sallies, Frisk-and-Come-Easies, a Punch and Judy Show, a Fat Man, a Fortune-Teller, and three marvellous acrobats from Hong Kong. And there were quantities of things to eat and lots to see, and Kiss-in-the-Ring, and all broke up after fireworks and “God Save the Queen” at half-past nine.

The house, as I keep on saying, was called Trafford House, but the _Home_ was called “The Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such like, with Brown Eyes, Narrow Cheekbones, Beaver Hats, and Pigtails, Ltd.” And it was “limited” because there could be only thirty of them, and time is not Eternity.

And now there were only three things that prevented Miss Rawlings from being too intensely happy to go on being alive; and these three were as follows: (_a_) She wanted to live always at the House—but how could the Parish get on without her? (_b_) What was she going to do when the Pigtailers became 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, etc., and grown-up? And (_c_) How could she ever possibly part with any of them or get any more?

For, you see, Miss Rawlings’s first-of-all Barbara Allan was aged 10, and had somehow managed to stay there. But because, I suppose, things often go right in this world when we are not particularly noticing them, and don’t know how, all these difficulties simply melted away at last like butter in the sun.