let to the book on
the grass. "You really ought to be, ashamed of yourselves, SICH
behaviour at a picnic. It's been a saving in oranges, though,
that's a mercy."

She took half a dozen great fat ones from the bag, as well as four
or five bananas, and went back with flying steps to the belt of trees,
where the General in his holland coat could just be seen.

He was calmly grubbing up the earth and putting it in his little red
mouth when she arrived with the bananas.

He looked up at her with an adorable smile. "BABY!" she said, swooping
down upon him with one of her wild rushes. "BABY!"

She kissed him fifty times; it almost hurt her sometimes, the feeling
of love for this little fat, dirty boy.

Then she gathered him up on her knee and wiped as much of the dirt as
possible from his mouth with the corner of his coat.

"Narna," he said, struggling onto the ground again; so she took the
skin from a great yellow one and put it in his small, chubby hand.

He ate some of it, and squeezed the rest up tightly in his hands,
gleefully watching it come up between his wee fingers in little
worm-like morsels.

Then he smeared it over his dimpled face, and even rubbed it on his
hair, while Judy was engrossed with her fifth orange.

So, of course, she had to whip him for doing it, or pretend to, which
came to the same thing. And then he had to whip her, which did not
only mean pretence.

He beat her with a stick he found near, he smacked her face and pulled
her hair and bumped himself up and down on her chest, and all in such
solemn, painstaking earnestness that she could only laugh even when
he really hurt her.

"Dood now?" he said at last anxiously. And she began to weep noisily,
with covered face and shaking shoulders, in the proper, penitent way.
And then he put his darling arms round her neck and hugged her, and
said "Ju-Ju" in a choking little voice, and patted her cheeks, and
gave her a hundred eager, wide, wet kisses till she was better.

Then they played chasings, and the General fell down twenty times,
and scratched his little knees and hands, and struggled up again.
and staggered on.

Presently Judy stood still in a hurry; there was a tick working
its slow way into her wrist. Only its two back legs were left out
from under the skin, and for a long time she pulled and pulled without
any success. Then it broke in two, and she had to leave one half in
for little Grandma and kerosene to extract on their