rand idea of making-snow
statues all along the terrace, so that Mother could see them from the
drawing-room windows. We worked very hard, and it was very difficult
to manage legs without breaking; so we made most of them Romans in
togas, and they looked very well from a distance, and lasted a long
time, because the frost lasted.

And, by degrees, I almost forgot that terrible afternoon in Mary's
Meadow. Only when Saxon came to see us I told him that I was very
glad that no one understood his bark, so that he could not let out
what had become of the hose-in-hose.

But when the winter was past, and the snow-drops came out in the
shrubbery, and there were catkins on the nut trees, and the
missel-thrush we had been feeding in the frost sat out on mild days
and sang to us, we all of us began to think of our gardens again, and
to go poking about "with our noses in the borders," as Arthur said,
"as if we were dogs snuffing after truffles." What we really were
"snuffing after" were the plants we had planted in autumn, and which
were poking and sprouting, and coming up in all directions.

Arthur and Harry did real gardening in the Easter holidays, and they
captured Adela now and then, and made her weed. But Christopher's
delight was to go with me to the waste places and hedges, where I had
planted things as Traveller's Joy, and to get me to show them to him
where they had begun to make a Spring start, and to help him to make
up rambling stories, which he called "Supposings," of what the flowers
would be like, and what this or that traveller would say when he saw
them. One of his favourite _supposings_ was--"Supposing a very poor
man was coming along the road, with his dinner in a handkerchief; and
supposing he sat down under the hedge to eat it; and supposing it was
cold beef; and he had no mustard; and supposing there was a seed on
your nasturtium plants, and he knew it wouldn't poison him; and
supposing he ate it with his beef, and it tasted nice and hot, like a
pickle, wouldn't he wonder how it got there?"

But when the primroses had been out a long time, and the cowslips were
coming into bloom, to my horror Christopher began "supposing" that we
should find hose-in-hose in some of the fields, and all my efforts to
put this idea out of his head, and to divert him from the search, were
utterly in vain.

Whether it had anything to do with his having had water on the brain I
do not know, but when once an idea got into Chris