rejoined Peter, "you only thought of making hay ones and sticking
them in the ivy for the sparrows, and they'd have been sopping LONG
before egg-laying time. It was me said clay and swallows."

"I don't care what you said."

"Look," said Bobbie, "I've made the nest all right again. Give me the
bit of stick to mark your initial name on it. But how can you? Your
letter and Peter's are the same. P. for Peter, P. for Phyllis."

"I put F. for Phyllis," said the child of that name. "That's how
it sounds. The swallows wouldn't spell Phyllis with a P., I'm
certain-sure."

"They can't spell at all," Peter was still insisting.

"Then why do you see them always on Christmas cards and valentines
with letters round their necks? How would they know where to go if they
couldn't read?"

"That's only in pictures. You never saw one really with letters round
its neck."

"Well, I have a pigeon, then; at least Daddy told me they did. Only it
was under their wings and not round their necks, but it comes to the
same thing, and--"

"I say," interrupted Bobbie, "there's to be a paperchase to-morrow."

"Who?" Peter asked.

"Grammar School. Perks thinks the hare will go along by the line at
first. We might go along the cutting. You can see a long way from
there."

The paperchase was found to be a more amusing subject of conversation
than the reading powers of swallows. Bobbie had hoped it might be. And
next morning Mother let them take their lunch and go out for the day to
see the paperchase.

"If we go to the cutting," said Peter, "we shall see the workmen, even
if we miss the paperchase."

Of course it had taken some time to get the line clear from the rocks
and earth and trees that had fallen on it when the great landslip
happened. That was the occasion, you will remember, when the three
children saved the train from being wrecked by waving six little
red-flannel-petticoat flags. It is always interesting to watch people
working, especially when they work with such interesting things as
spades and picks and shovels and planks and barrows, when they have
cindery red fires in iron pots with round holes in them, and red lamps
hanging near the works at night. Of course the children were never
out at night; but once, at dusk, when Peter had got out of his bedroom
skylight on to the roof, he had seen the red lamp shining far away at
the edge of the cutting. The children had often been down to watch the
work, and this day the intere