ne's fate. Spring cleaning--which is something
like what it would be to build, paint, and furnish a house, and to "do
it at home"--takes place as naturally as the season it celebrates; but
if you want the front door kept open after the usual hour for drawing
the bolts and hanging the robbers' bell, it's odds if the master of the
house has not an apoplectic fit, and if servants of twelve and fourteen
years' standing do not give warning.

And what is difficult on week-days is on Sundays next door to
impossible, for obvious reasons.

But one's parents, though they have their little ways like other
people, are, as a rule--oh, my heart! made sadder and wiser by the
world's rough experiences, bear witness!--very indulgent; and after a
good many ups and downs, and some compromising and coaxing, I got my
way.

On one point my mother was firm, and I feared this would be an
insuperable difficulty. I must go twice to church, as our Sunday custom
was--a custom which she saw no good reason for me to break. It is easy
to smile at her punctiliousness on this score; but after all these
years, and on the whole, I think she was right. An unexpected compromise
came to my rescue, however: Isaac Irvine's bees were in the parish of
Cripple Charlie's father, within a stone's throw (by the bee-master's
strong arm) of the church itself, which was a small minster among the
moors. Here I promised faithfully to attend Evening Prayer, for which we
should be in time; and I started, by Isaac Irvine's side, on my first
real "expedition" on the first Sunday in August, with my mother's
blessing and a threepenny-bit with a hole in it, "in case of a
collection."

We dined before we started, I with the rest, and Isaac in our kitchen;
but I had no great appetite--I was too much excited--and I willingly
accepted some large sandwiches made with thick slices of home-made bread
and liberal layers of home-made potted meat, "in case I should feel
hungry" before I got there.

It pains me to think how distressed my mother was because I insisted on
carrying the sandwiches in a red and orange spotted handkerchief, which
I had purchased with my own pocket-money, and to which I was deeply
attached, partly from the bombastic nature of the pattern, and partly
because it was big enough for any grown-up man. "It made me look like a
tramping sailor," she said. I did not tell her that this was precisely
the effect at which I aimed, though it was the case; but I coaxed