he could have known that half the besieged garrison wore pinafores?”

“And the other half knickerbockers. Yes—frightfully. Do stand still—you’re only tightening the knot,” said Anthea.

CHAPTER VIII

BIGGER THAN THE BAKER’S BOY

Look here,” said Cyril. “I’ve got an idea.” “Does it hurt much?” said Robert sympathetically. “Don’t be a jackape! I’m not humbugging.”

“Shut up, Bobs!” said Anthea.

“Silence for the Squirrel’s oration,” said Robert.

Cyril balanced himself on the edge of the water-butt in the back-yard, where they all happened to be, and spoke.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen—and women—we found a Sammyadd. We have had wishes. We’ve had wings, and being beautiful as the day—ugh!—that was pretty jolly beastly if you like—and wealth and castles, and that rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we’re no forrader.bg We haven’t really got anything worth having for our wishes.”

“We’ve had things happening,” said Robert; “that’s always something.”

“It’s not enough, unless they’re the right things,” said Cyril firmly. “Now I’ve been thinking—”

“Not really?” whispered Robert.

“In the silent what’s-its-names of the night. It’s like suddenly being asked something out of history—the date of the Conquest or something; you know it all right all the time, but when you’re asked it all goes out of your head. Ladies and gentlemen, you know jolly well that when we’re all rotting about in the usual way heaps of things keep cropping up, and then real earnest wishes come into the heads of the beholder—”

“Hear, hear!” said Robert.

“—of the beholder, however stupid he is,” Cyril went on. “Why, even Robert might happen to think of a really useful wish if he didn’t injure his poor little brains trying so hard to think.—Shut up, Bobs, I tell you!—You’ll have the whole show over.”

A struggle on the edge of a water-butt is exciting, but damp. When it was over, and the boys were partially dried, Anthea said:

“It really was you began it, Bobs. Now honour is satisfied, do let Squirrel go on. We’re wasting the whole morning.”

“Well then,” said Cyril, still wringing the water out of the tails of his jacket, “I’ll call it paxbh if Bobs will.”

“Pax then,” said Robert sulkily. “But I’ve got a lump as big as a cricket ball over my eye.”

Anthea patiently offered a dust-coloured handkerchief, and Robert bathed his wounds in silence. “Now, Squirrel,” she said.

“Well then—let’s just play bandits, or forts, or soldiers, or any of the old games. We’re dead sure to think of something if we try not to. You always do.”

The others consented. Bandits was hastily chosen for the game. “It’s as good as anything else,” said Jane gloomily. It must be owned that Robert was at first but a half-hearted bandit, but when Anthea had borrowed from Martha the red-spotted handkerchief in which the keeper had brought her mushrooms that morning, and had tied up Robert’s head with it so that he could be the wounded hero who had saved the bandit captain’s life the day before, he cheered up wonderfully. All were soon armed. Bows and arrows slung on the back look well; and umbrellas and cricket stumps stuck through the belt give a fine impression of the wearer’s being armed to the teeth. The white cotton hats that men wear in the country nowadays have a very brigandish effect when a few turkey’s feathers are stuck in them. The Lamb’s mail-cart was covered with a red-and-blue checked tablecloth, and made an admirable baggage-wagon. The Lamb asleep inside it was not at all in the way. So the banditti set out along the road that led to the sand-pit.

“We ought to be near the Sammyadd,” said Cyril, “in case we think of anything suddenly.”

It is all very well to make up your minds to play bandits—or chess, or ping-pong, or any other agreeable game—but it is not easy to do it with spirit when all the wonderful wishes you can think of, or can’t think of, are waiting for you round the corner. The game was dragging a little, and some of the bandits were beginning to feel that the others were disagreeable things, and were saying so candidly, when the baker’s boy came along the road with loaves in a basket. The opportunity was not one to be lost.

“Stand and deliver!” cried Cyril.

“Your money or your life!” said Robert.

And they stood on each side of the baker’s boy. Unfortunately, he did not seem to enter into the spirit of the thing at all. He was a baker’s boy of an unusually large size. He merely said:

“Chuck it now,bi d’ye hear!” and pushed the