y, and their red berries shine through
the dusty grass and nettles that have been growing up round them all
the summer out of the ditch.

Flowers were one reason for our wanting to go to Mary's Meadow.
Another reason was the nightingale. There was one that used always to
sing there, and Mother had made us a story about it.

We are very fond of fairy books, and one of our greatest favourites is
Bechstein's _As Pretty as Seven._ It has very nice pictures, and we
particularly like "The Man in the Moon, and How He Came There;" but
the story doesn't end well, for he came there by gathering sticks on
Sunday, and then scoffing about it, and he has been there ever since.
But Mother made us a new fairy tale about the nightingale in Mary's
Meadow being the naughty woodcutter's only child, who was turned into
a little brown bird that lives on in the woods, and sits on a tree on
summer nights, and sings to its father up in the moon.

But after our Father and the Old Squire went to law, Mother told us we
must be content with hearing the nightingale from a distance. We did
not really know about the lawsuit then, we only understood that the
Old Squire was rather crosser than usual; and we rather resented being
warned not to go into Mary's Meadow, especially as Father kept saying
we had a perfect right so to do. I thought that Mother was probably
afraid of Saxon being set at us, and of course I had no fears about
him. Indeed, I used to wish that it could happen that the Old Squire,
riding after me as full of fury as King Padella in the _Rose and the
Ring_, might set Saxon on me, as the lions were let loose to eat the
Princess Rosalba. "Instead of devouring her with their great teeth, it
was with kisses they gobbled her up. They licked her pretty feet,
they nuzzled their noses in her lap," and she put her arms "round
their tawny necks and kissed them." Saxon gobbles us with kisses, and
nuzzles his nose, and we put our arms round his tawny neck. What a
surprise it would be to the Old Squire to see him! And then I wondered
if my feet were as pretty as Rosalba's, and I thought they were, and I
wondered if Saxon would lick them, supposing that by any possibility
it could ever happen that I should be barefoot in Mary's Meadow at the
mercy of the Old Squire and his bull-dog.

One does not, as a rule, begin to go to bed by letting down one's
hair, and taking off one's shoes and stockings. But one night I was
silly enough to do this, just t