do if you saw two lions in the road, one on each
side, and you didn't know if they was loose or if they was chained up?"

"Do?" shouted Edward, valiantly, "I should--I should--I should--"

His boastful accents died away into a mumble: "Dunno what I should do."

"Shouldn't do anything," I observed after consideration; and really it
would be difficult to arrive at a wiser conclusion.

"If it came to DOING," remarked Harold, reflectively, "the lions would
do all the doing there was to do, wouldn't they?"

"But if they was GOOD lions," rejoined Charlotte, "they would do as they
would be done by."

"Ah, but how are you to know a good lion from a bad one?" said Edward.
"The books don't tell you at all, and the lions ain't marked any
different."

"Why, there aren't any good lions," said Harold, hastily.

"Oh yes, there are, heaps and heaps," contradicted Edward. "Nearly all
the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles' lion,
and St. Jerome's lion, and--and--the Lion and the Unicorn--"

"He beat the Unicorn," observed Harold, dubiously, "all round the town."

"That PROVES he was a good lion," cried Edwards triumphantly. "But the
question is, how are you to tell 'em when you see 'em?"

"_I_ should ask Martha," said Harold of the simple creed.

Edward snorted contemptuously, then turned to Charlotte. "Look here," he
said; "let's play at lions, anyhow, and I'll run on to that corner and
be a lion,--I'll be two lions, one on each side of the road,--and
you'll come along, and you won't know whether I'm chained up or not, and
that'll be the fun!"

"No, thank you," said Charlotte, firmly; "you'll be chained up till
I'm quite close to you, and then you'll be loose, and you'll tear me in
pieces, and make my frock all dirty, and p'raps you'll hurt me as well.
_I_ know your lions!"

"No, I won't; I swear I won't," protested Edward. "I'll be quite a new
lion this time,--something you can't even imagine." And he raced off to
his post. Charlotte hesitated; then she went timidly on, at each step
growing less Charlotte, the mummer of a minute, and more the anxious
Pilgrim of all time. The lion's wrath waxed terrible at her approach;
his roaring filled the startled air. I waited until they were both
thoroughly absorbed, and then I slipped through the hedge out of the
trodden highway, into the vacant meadow spaces. It was not that I was
unsociable, nor that I knew Edward's lions to the point of satiety; but
th