The Incredible Honeymoon. Nesbit Edith

in the bar the wasps buzzed in the bottle that had seemed so sweet a bourn to each as it drifted in from the out-of-door heat to the cool darkness of the sanded bar.

      On the broad, white door-step the old cat slept, his person nicely adjusted to the sun and shade, his flanks in the sunshine and his head in the shadow of the porch. The white blind of the window swelled out, now and then, like a sail, because in this sort of weather one leaves all doors and windows open. In the yard some one had drawn a bucket of water – the brown oak and the brown iron of the bucket were still wet, and still wet the trail it had made where it was carried to the old bath that the chickens drank from. But the trail was drying quickly, and the hens, having had their drink, had gone to sleep in the hollows they had scooped for themselves in the dust of their inclosure. Some one had been chopping wood, for a few chips lay round the block, in which the bill was stuck by its sharp edge. The man who attended to the wood and water was asleep, standing against the ladder that led from the stable to the hay-loft – a convenient position, and, if you were wanted in a hurry, not compromising, as lying down would be.

      To right and left the road stretched, very white and shining, between dusty hedgerows and scattered cottages whose drawn blinds looked like the eyelids of sleepers. The whole village was asleep, it seemed – only a boy and a dog were awake. The boy had not gone to school because he had torn his every-day trousers on a nail in the stable. To wear his Sunday trousers was, of course, out of the question. And to mend the every-day trousers would take time. So Tommy was put to bed, nominally as a punishment for not looking where he was going – a most unfair implication, for the nail had attacked him in the rear. Children do not go to sleep when they are put to bed as a punishment. They cry, if their spirit has been broken by unkindness; if not, they lie and meditate mischief. Tommy waited till the afternoon silence settled on the house, and then very carefully and slowly crept down the stairs in his nightshirt, dodged Gladys and the mop, and reached the larder. Here he secured a flead-cake, a raisin-cake, and an apple, dodged Gladys again, and reached the back door, where he stood looking out at the yard. It would be silly to go back to bed. Mother would not be awake for a good half-hour yet. There would be time to get to the stable, climb into the loft, and eat his booty there. It would be safer, in one way, and in another more adventurous.

      He stooped till his head was below the kitchen window and crept by, skirting the walls of the yard till he reached the stable door, and next moment was safe in the half-darkness where the sunlight through the cracks of the door made dusty shafts of radiance. The familiar smell of hay and horses charmed him, as it always did. Ah, there was Robert, asleep as usual. Well, even if Robert woke, he could be trusted not to tell. Tommy climbed into the manger of one of the empty stalls, and just as he got his knee on it some one behind pushed him with sudden and incredible violence. He fell heavily, dropped his plunder, and found himself involved in the enthusiastic embraces of a large, strange, white dog, which in one breathless instant licked his face all over, trampled on his stomach, made two mouthfuls of the flead-cake and the raisin-cake, rolled the apple in the muck of the stable, snorted in a sort of brutal ecstasy, and bolted heavily out into the sunshine.

      It was too much. The sudden and brutal attack overcame all considerations of prudence. Tommy forgot where he was, and why; the dangers of his situation were nothing beside the outrage of this unprovoked assault and theft. Robert was awakening slowly. If he had been awake before he might have repulsed the enemy. Tommy opened his mouth to howl, but the howl changed to a scream, for there was the dog back again, snuffing loudly in the straw and fawning at Tommy as on an old and valued friend.

      "Charles!" a stern voice called from the yard, "come here, sir."

      The dog wagged a muscular tail and grinned at Tommy, as though inviting him to share the joke. The stable door was darkened by a form. Even in the difficulties of repulsing the dog's attention without irritating it, the child found time to be glad that the darkening form was that of a stranger.

      "Call him off, if he's your dog," Tommy urged, thickly, backing against the manger.

      "Might as well call him off, sir," Robert – now almost awake – conceded.

      The stranger stepped forward, a snap clicked, and Charles, still widely smiling, was straining at the end of a leathern thong.

      "I hope he didn't frighten you," said the stranger.

      "He bunted at me with his great head," said Tommy, with half a sob, "and then he eat up what I'd got, and hooked it off again afore you could say knife."

      "What had you got?"

      "Nothing," said Tommy, remembering caution, "at least – "

      "The jingling of the guinea heals," said the stranger, incomprehensibly. "Would sixpence be any comfort to you?"

      Tommy's eyes answered, and the stranger held it out.

      "Thank you, sir," said Tommy, and added, in close imitation of his father's manner to thirsty travelers, "Going far to-day, sir?"

      "I was thinking," said the stranger, "of putting up here."

      "Then," said Tommy, with great presence of mind, "please don't say anything to them about the dog eating – what he did eat – nor me being here in my shirt, nor about Robert being asleep. If you'll go round to the front, sir, you'll find the bar, and that'll give me a chance to slip back to bed, sir, if you'd be so kind."

      "I see," said the stranger, "you were sent to bed."

      "In punishment like," said Tommy, "so you see I don't want to.."

      "Exactly. An unobserved retreat. I will draw the enemy's fire from the front premises. Come, Charles."

      Charles obeyed, only pausing to entangle the lead in the handle of a shovel and to bring this down upon the feet of Robert, to upset a sieve of chaff and run between his master's legs with a sudden violence which, but for the support of the door-post, would have thrown him to the ground.

      "Nice-spoken young man," said Robert. "Now, young Tommy, you cut along back where you belong. I'll be asking Gladys the time to keep her off of the back door while you slips in, you young limb."

      He strolled across to the window as Tommy's bare feet trod the sun-warmed bricks to the back door. As the child crept up the stairs he heard the stranger's voice in the bar.

      "Sixpence," said Tommy, in ecstasy, "and him going to put up here." He cuddled down into his bed well satisfied with the afternoon's adventure. Adventures are, indeed, to the adventurous.

      "If I'd 'a' bin a good boy and stayed in bed nothing wouldn't have happened," was how he put it to himself.

      Meanwhile the stranger, encumbered by the striving Charles, was "being shown the rooms" – the bare, much-scrubbed bedroom, the all-too-full and too-carpeted parlor.

      "They are exactly what I want," he said, and so won the heart of his hostess.

      When Tommy, his trousers restored, came down to tea he was warned not to go clamping about in his boots, because there was a gentleman in the parlor. Tommy fingered the sixpence in his pocket and said nothing; his mouth was, indeed, far too full for words.

      That evening in the parched orchard behind the house Tommy came edging shyly toward the stranger as he lounged under the trees smoking a fat pipe.

      "Hullo, young man!" was the greeting. "Come here and talk to me."

      Tommy dumbly drew near.

      "Got your trousers back, I see," said the stranger, genially.

      Tommy admitted it with a grunt. The stranger nodded and took his pipe out of his mouth.

      "Ever see a pig?" he asked.

      Tommy grunted again.

      "I see you have. You speak their language awfully well." The stranger uttered a sound which Tommy recognized and smiled to hear. "That's what the pigs say," said the stranger. "Agreeable little boys who have recovered their trousers say 'Yes' or 'No' when their friends ask them questions. Don't they?"

      "I dun'no'," said Tommy.

      "Oh yes, you do. Because I've told you. Now what would you like to do?"

      "I dun'no'."

      "I can't tell you that you know, because