n to laugh, thinking it was rare fun.

"Take me 'pick-a-back,'" said he.

So the bailiff stooped and took him. "Gee-up!" said Bevis, punching his
broad back and kicking him to go faster. Pan, now quite forgotten, crept
along behind them.

Bevis listened to the lecture they gave him at home with a very bad
grace. He sulked and pouted, as if he had himself been the injured
party. But no sooner was he released from the dinner-table, than he was
down on his knees at his own particular corner cupboard, the one that
had been set apart for his toys and things ever since he could walk. It
was but a small cupboard, made across the angle of two walls, and with
one shelf only, yet it was bottomless, and always contained something
new.

There were the last fragments of the great box of wooden bricks, cut and
chipped, and notched and splintered by that treasure, his pocket-knife.
There was the tin box for the paste, or the worms in moss, when he went
fishing. There was the wheel of his old wheelbarrow, long since smashed
and numbered with the Noah's arks that have gone the usual way. There
was the brazen cylinder of a miniature steam-engine bent out of all
shape. There was the hammer-head made specially for him by the
blacksmith down in the village, without a handle, for people were tired
of putting new handles to it, he broke them so quickly. There was a
horse-shoe, and the iron catch of a gate, and besides these a boxwood
top, which he could not spin, but which he had payed away half the
savings in his money-box for, because he had seen it split the other
boys' tops in the road.

In one corner was a brass cannon, the touch-hole blackened by the
explosion of gunpowder, and by it the lock of an ancient pistol--the
lock only, and neither barrel nor handle. An old hunting-crop, some
feathers from pheasants' tails, part of a mole-trap, an old brazen
bugle, much battered, a wooden fig-box full of rusty nails, several
scraps of deal board and stumps of cedar pencil were heaped together in
confusion. But these were not all, nor could any written inventory
exhaust the contents, and give a perfect list of all that cupboard held.
There was always something new in it: Bevis never went there, but he
found something.

With the hunting-crop he followed the harriers and chased the doubling
hare; with the cannon he fought battles, such as he saw in the pictures;
the bugle, too, sounded the charge (the bailiff sometimes blew it in the
garde