--of the Red Etain of Ireland who lived
in Belligand, and who stole the King's daughter, the King of fair
Scotland; and the pathetic tale of the bannock that went to see the
world, with its cynical end: "Ah, well! We'll all be in the tod's hole
in less than a hunner years."

It was Father who gave us first a love for books, and taught us the
magic of lovely words. And it was Father who tried to place our
stumbling little childish feet in the Narrow Way, and to turn our eyes
ever towards a better country--"that is an heavenly!" I suppose it
was the dimly-understood talk of the better country that gave John and
me the idea of our Kingdom.

It was a great secret once, but now I may tell without breaking faith.
Boggley and the Bird were prosaic people, caring more for bird-nesting
and Red Indian hunting than games of make-believe, so they never knew.
It was part of the sunny old garden, our Kingdom, and was called
Nontland because it was ruled by one Nont. He had once been a common
ninepin, but having had a hole bored through his middle with a red-hot
wire he became possessed of a mystic power and personality. Even
we--his creators, so to speak--stood somewhat in awe of him.

The River Beulah flowed through Nontland, and it was bounded on the
north by the Celestial Mountains; on the south by the red brick wall,
where the big pears grew; on the west by the Rose of Sharon tree; and
on the east by the pig-sty. That last sounds something of a descent,
but it wasn't really a pig-sty, and I can't think why it was called
so, for, to my knowledge, it had never harboured anything but two
innocent white Russian rabbits with pink eyes. It was situated at the
foot of the kitchen-garden, next door to the hen-houses; the roof,
made of pavement flags, was easy to climb, and, sloping as it did to
the top of the wall overlooking the high-road, was greatly prized by
us as a watch-tower from which we could see the world go by.

To get into our Kingdom we knocked at the Wicket Gate, murmuring as we
did so:

"El Dorado
Yo he trovado,"

and it opened--with a push. We hadn't an idea then, nor have I now,
what the words meant. We got them out of a book called _The Spanish
Brothers_, and thought them splendidly mysterious.

Besides ourselves, and Nont, and the Russian rabbits, there was only
one other denizen of our Kingdom--a turkey with a broken leg, a
lonely, lovable fowl which John, out of pity, raised to the peerage
and the offi