'I don't want your beastly ball,' Oswald said, 'only I hate unfairness.
However, I don't know where it is just now. When I find it you shall
have it to bowl with as often as you want.'

'Then you're not waxy?'

And Oswald said 'No' and they went in to tea together. So that was all
right. There were raisin cakes for tea.

Next day we happened to want to go down to the river quite early. I
don't know why; this is called Fate, or Destiny. We dropped in at the
'Rose and Crown' for some ginger-beer on our way. The landlady is a
friend of ours and lets us drink it in her back parlour, instead of in
the bar, which would be improper for girls.

We found her awfully busy, making pies and jellies, and her two sisters
were hurrying about with great hams, and pairs of chickens, and rounds
of cold beef and lettuces, and pickled salmon and trays of crockery and
glasses.

'It's for the angling competition,' she said.

We said, 'What's that?'

'Why,' she said, slicing cucumber like beautiful machinery while she
said it, 'a lot of anglers come down some particular day and fish one
particular bit of the river. And the one that catches most fish gets the
prize. They're fishing the pen above Stoneham Lock. And they all come
here to dinner. So I've got my hands full and a trifle over.'

We said, 'Couldn't we help?'

But she said, 'Oh, no, thank you. Indeed not, please. I really am so I
don't know which way to turn. Do run along, like dears.'

So we ran along like these timid but graceful animals.

Need I tell the intellectual reader that we went straight off to the pen
above Stoneham Lock to see the anglers competing? Angling is the same
thing as fishing.

I am not going to try and explain locks to you. If you've never seen
a lock you could never understand even if I wrote it in words of one
syllable and pages and pages long. And if you have, you'll understand
without my telling you. It is harder than Euclid if you don't know
beforehand. But you might get a grown-up person to explain it to you
with books or wooden bricks.

I will tell you what a pen is because that is easy. It is the bit of
river between one lock and the next. In some rivers 'pens' are called
'reaches', but pen is the proper word.

We went along the towing-path; it is shady with willows, aspens,
alders, elders, oaks and other trees. On the banks are flowers--yarrow,
meadow-sweet, willow herb, loosestrife, and lady's bed-straw. Oswald
learned the names of a