EDWARD was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one that had last passed under the dentist’s hands, to be the capitalist of the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff obtained in ours: half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately—in spite of Edward’s interested affectation of agony—had been shakiness undisguised; but the event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however, Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement, and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and most self-respecting of the rabbits had been let loose[134] to grace the feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for bits of broken cork.

‘Hurry up, can’t you?’ growled our host; ‘what are you girls always so beastly particular for?’

‘Martha says,’ explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), ‘that if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells inside you, till you——’

‘O bosh!’ said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

‘O, it’s all very well to say bosh,’ replied Harold nettled: ‘but every one knows it’s true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of his glass, and then he said, “Poo, my goodness, that’s[135] corked!” And he wouldn’t touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny part was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought out into the passage, and there wasn’t any cork in it at all! So I drank it all off, and it was very good!’

‘You’d better be careful, young man!’ said his elder brother, regarding him severely: ‘D’you remember that night when the Mummers were here, and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the glasses after they had gone away?’

‘Ow! I did feel funny that night,’ chuckled Harold. ‘Thought the house was comin’ down, it jumped about so: and Martha had to carry me up to bed, ’cos the stairs was goin’ all waggity!’

We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a delinquency.

A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then,[136] jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going for a walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our Family to meet with physical coercion any independence of action in individuals.

‘She’s off with those Vicarage girls again,’ said Edward, regarding Selina’s long black legs twinkling down the path. ‘She goes out with them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessèd time! I can’t make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it’s gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!’

‘P’raps they talk about birds’-eggs,’ I suggested sleepily (the sun was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); &............