riness often, in perils of
waters, in perils by their own countrymen, in perils on the road, in the
wilderness, in the sea, in hunger and thirst, in cold and nakedness. In
perils too, so Gerda believed, of cattle; for these would stray in
bellowing herds about narrow lanes, and they would all charge straight
through them, missing the lowered horns by some incredible fluke of
fortune. If this seems to make Gerda a coward, it should be remembered
that she showed none of these inward blenchings, but went on her way with
the rest, composed as a little wax figure at Madame Tussaud's. She was,
in fact, of the stuff of which martyrs are made, and would probably have
gone to the stake for a conviction. But stampeding cattle, and high seas,
and brakeless lightning descents, she did not like, however brave a face
she was sustained by grace to meet them with. After all she was only
twenty, an age when some people still look beneath their beds before
retiring.

Bulls, even, Gerda was called upon to face, in the wake of two unafraid
males and a reckless aunt. What young female of twenty, always excepting
those who have worked on the land, and whose chief reward is familiarity
with its beasts, can with complete equanimity face bulls? One day a path
they were taking down to the sea ran for a while along the top of a
stone hedge, about five feet high and three feet wide. Most people
would have walked along this, leading their bicycles. Nan, naturally,
bicycled, and Barry and Kay, finding it an amusing experiment, bicycled
after her. Gerda, in honour bound, bicycled too. She accepted stoically
the probability that she would very soon bicycle off the hedge into the
field and be hurt. In the fields on either side of them, cows stared at
them in mild surprise and some disdain, coming up close to look. So, if
one bicycled off, it would be into the very jaws, onto the very horns, of
cattle. Female cattle, indeed, but cattle none the less.

Then Kay chanted "Fat bulls of Basan came round about me on either side,"
and it was just like that. One fat bull at least trotted up to the hedge,
waving his tail and snorting, pawing and glaring, evincing, in short,
all the symptoms common to his kind.

So now if one bicycled off it would be into the very maw of an angry
bull.

"You look out you don't fall, Gerda," Kay flung back at her over his
shoulder. "It will be to a dreadful death, as you see. Nobody'll save
you; nobody'll dare."

"Feeling un