en you stop when you have run about
half-way down it, and then you are lost; but there is another little
wooden house near here, called the Lost House, and so you tell the man
that you are lost and then he finds you. It is glorious fun racing
down the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are
not there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost
nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.
From the Hump we can see the gate that is called after Miss Mabel Grey,
the Fig I promised to tell you about. There were always two nurses
with her, or else one mother and one nurse, and for a long time she was
a pattern-child who always coughed off the table and said, 'How do you
do?' to the other Figs, and the only game she played at was flinging a
ball gracefully and letting the nurse bring it back to her. Then one
day she tired of it all and went mad-dog, and, first, to show that she
really was mad-dog, she unloosened both her boot-laces and put out her
tongue east, west, north, and south. She then flung her sash into a
puddle and danced on it till dirty water was squirted over her frock,
after which she climbed the fence and had a series of incredible
adventures, one of the least of which was that she kicked off both her
boots. At last she came to the gate that is now called after her, out
of which she ran into streets David and I have never been in though we
have heard them roaring, and still she ran on and would never again
have been heard of had not her mother jumped into a 'bus and thus
overtaken her. It all happened, I should say, long ago, and this is
not the Mabel Grey whom David knows.
Returning up the Broad Walk we have on our right the Baby Walk, which
is so full of perambulators that you could cross from side to side
stepping on babies, but the nurses won't let you do it. From this walk
a passage called Bunting's Thumb, because it is that length, leads into
Picnic Street, where there are real kettles, and chestnut-blossom falls
into your mug as you are drinking. Quite common children picnic here
also, and the blossom falls into their mugs just the same.
Next comes St. Govor's Well, which was full of water when Malcolm the
Bold fell into it. He was his mother's favourite, and he let her put
her arm round his neck in public because she was a widow; but he was
also partial to adventures, and liked to play with a chimney-sweep who
had killed a good many bear
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