nd Sunday-school treat. There were dozens of different kinds of cake,
and bread-and-butter, both white and brown, and gooseberries and plums
and jam sandwiches. And the girls decorated the tables with
flowers--blue larkspur and white canterbury bells. And at about three
there was a noise of people walking in the road, and presently the
Antiquities began to come in at the front gate, and stood about on the
lawn by twos and threes and sixes and sevens, looking shy and uncomfy,
exactly like a Sunday-school treat. Presently some gentlemen came, who
looked like the teachers; they were not shy, and they came right up to
the door. So Albert's uncle, who had not been too proud to be up in our
room with us watching the people on the lawn through the netting of our
short blinds, said:

"I suppose that's the Committee. Come on!"

So we all went down--we were in our Sunday things--and Albert's uncle
received the Committee like a feudal system baron, and we were his
retainers.

He talked about dates, and king-posts and gables, and mullions, and
foundations, and records, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and poetry, and Julius
Caesar, and Roman remains, and lych-gates and churches, and dog's-tooth
moulding till the brain of Oswald reeled. I suppose that Albert's uncle
remarked that all our mouths were open, which is a sign of reels in the
brain, for he whispered:

"Go hence, and mingle unsuspected with the crowd!"

So we went out on to the lawn, which was now crowded with men and women
and one child. This was a girl; she was fat, and we tried to talk to
her, though we did not like her. (She was covered in red velvet like an
arm-chair.) But she wouldn't. We thought at first she was from a
deaf-and-dumb asylum, where her kind teachers had only managed to teach
the afflicted to say "Yes" and "No." But afterwards we knew better, for
Noel heard her say to her mother, "I wish you hadn't brought me, mamma.
I didn't have a pretty teacup, and I haven't enjoyed my tea one bit."
And she had had five pieces of cake, besides little cakes and nearly a
whole plate of plums, and there were only twelve pretty teacups
altogether.

Several grown-ups talked to us in a most uninterested way, and then the
President read a paper about the Moat House, which we couldn't
understand, and other people made speeches we couldn't understand
either, except the part about kind hospitality, which made us not know
where to look.

Then Dora and Alice and Daisy and Mrs. Pe