revolt. She walks about the green garden reading novels, and waiting for the Prince, for she has a nice nature. I myself should just turn down the collar of my dress, put on a wreath and go out and find a Prince, or know the reason why!

We keep no gardener, only Ben. Ben is short for Benvenuto Cellini, another of George’s friends. He is thirteen, old enough to go to school, only George hasn’t yet been able to make up his mind where to send him. It is a good thing Ben has plenty of work to do, for he is very cross, and talks sometimes of running away to sea, only that he has the North border to dig, or Cat Corner to clear.

That is the corner George calls The Pleasaunce—it is we who call it Cat Corner. Not only dead cats come there, but brickbats and tin kettles with just one little hole in them, and brown-paper parcels that we open with a poker. I hope there will be a dead baby in one some day, to reward us. The trees are so dirty that we don’t like to touch them, and the birds that scurry about in the bushes would be yellow, like canaries, Sarah says, only for the dirt of London. I hardly believe it, I should like to catch one and wash it. In the opposite corner George has built a grotto, and we have to keep it dusted, and he sits there and writes and smokes. The next garden is the garden of a mad-house. The doctor keeps a donkey and a pony. Once a table-knife came flying over the wall to us. George’s nerves were so thoroughly upset that he could not bear anything but Ouida and Miss Braddon read aloud to him all the rest of the day. Mother happens to like those authors and another Italian lady’s books that we are forbidden to mention in this house. She never reads George’s own works; she says she has promised to be a good wife to him, but that that wasn’t in the bond. She knows them too well, having heard them all in the rough. Behind the scenes in a novel is as dull as behind the scenes in a theatre, you never know what the play is about. Aunt Gerty says that all George’s things are rank, and quite undramatic, and George says he is glad to hear it, for he doesn’t like Aunt Gerty.

The other persons in the house are George’s cats. There are three. The grey cat, the only one who has kittens, I call Lady Castlewood, out of Esmond by Thackeray. George sometimes says “that little cat of a Lady Castlewood”—it occurred to me that “that little Lady Castlewood of a cat” just suits ours, for she is a jealous beast, a cantankerous beast, and goes Nap with her claws all over your face in no time! She hates her children once they are grown up, and is merely on bowing terms with them, or you might call it licking terms—for she doesn’t mind giving them a wash and a brush-up whenever they come her way. Robert the Devil was the one that stayed away a week. He is very big and mild; he can lie down and wrap himself in his fur till he looks all over alike, and you couldn’t find any particular part of him, no more than if he were a kind of soft hedgehog. George talks to them and tells them things about himself.

“I am sure they are welcome to his confidence!” that is what the new cook said. She likes them better than she likes him. She is quite kind to cats, though she gives them a hoist with her foot sometimes, when they get in her way. They are valuable, you see. I wish I was, for then people care what you eat and give you medecines, which I love. It isn’t often you are disappointed in a new bottle of medecine, except when there’s gentian in it.

CHAPTER II

YOU don’t get a very good class of servant down this way, my mother says, but then she is so particular. She is the kind of mistress who knows how to do everything better herself, and that kind never gets good servants; it seems to paralyze the poor girls, and make them limp and without an idea in their heads, or what they choose to call their heads, which I strongly suspect is their stomachs. You can punish or reward a servant best through its stomach, and don’t give them beer, or beer-money either! Beer makes them cross or cheeky, depending, I suppose, on the make of the beer. Mother never gives it. They buy it, I know, but I never tell. It would be as much as my place (in the kitchen) is worth, and I value my right of free entry.

Mother is terribly down on dust too. She has a book about germ culture, and sees germs in everything. It doesn’t make her any happier. But as for dusting, so far as I can see, what they call dusting is only a plan for raising the dirt and taking it to some other place. It gets into our mouths in the end. I do pity Matter that is always getting into the wrong place, chivied here and there, with no resting-place for the sole of the foot. For whenever Mother sees dust anywhere, or suspects it, she makes a cross with her finger in it, and the servants are supposed to see the cross and feel ashamed. Though I don’t believe any servant was ever ashamed in her life. ’Tisn’t in their natures. They just grin and bear with it—with the dust, and the scolding too.

“It’s ’er little way,” I heard Sarah say once, not a bit unkindly or disagreeably, though, after Mother had come down on her about something. But once I caught the very same girl shaking her fist at George’s back and calling him “an old beast!”

“Sarah,” I said, “whom are you addressing?”

“The doctor’s donkey, miss,” she said, as quick as lightning, pointing to it grazing in the doctor’s garden next door. People were always overloading that donkey, and shaking their fists at it.

I must get to the new cook. The last one gave Mother notice, and I never could find out why, because she was fond of Mother and could stand the cats.

“Oh, I like you, ma’am,” I heard her say, just as if she disliked some one else. Mother took no notice, but left the kitchen, and Cook took a currant off her elbow and pulled down her sleeves, and mumbled to Sarah, “It isn’t right, and I for one ain’t going to help countenance it. A-visiting his family now and then between jobs, just like a burglar—or some-think worse!”

What is worse than a burglar? I was passing the scullery window, and Sarah had just thrown a lot of boiling water into a basin in front of them both, so that it made a mist and she didn’t see me. I knew, though, she was saying something rude, for when Sarah told her she “shouldn’t reely,” she muttered something more about a “neglected angel!” I did think at first she meant me, or perhaps the doctor’s donkey as usual, but then the words didn’t fit either of us? I asked her straight if she did mean the donkey, just for fun, and she said the poor beast was minding his own business and I had better do the same.

She left us next month, crying worse than I ever did in my life for really serious things. Mother patted her on the back as she went out at the back door, and she kept saying, “A poor girl’s only got her character, mum, and she is bound to think of it—” and Mother said, “Yes, yes, you did quite right!” and seemed just to want her out of the house and a little peace and quiet and will of her own. The very moment Sarah’s back was turned, she set to work and turned everything into the middle of the room and left it there while she and Cook swept round into every corner. Ariadne and I rather enjoyed clearing our bed of the towel-horse before we could lie down in it, and having dinner off the corner of the kitchen-table because the dining-room one was lying on its back like a horse kicking.

Of course George wasn’t allowed home all this time. Mother wrote to him where he was staying at the Duke of Frocester’s for the shooting (George shooting! My eye!—and the keeper’s legs!) and said he had better not come home till we were straight again. I was in no hurry to be straight again. It was like Heaven. When I was a child I always