or wave Laura on with “Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!” At that time their conversation when alone together was tinged with the language of their favourite romances. Sometimes Edmund would amuse his sister and himself by translating, when a battered old zinc bucket became “ye antique pail”, or a tree slightly damaged by the wind “yon lightning-blasted pine”, while some good neighbour of theirs whom they could see working in the fields would have given Edmund what he would have called “a darned good bommicking” if he had heard himself referred to as “yon caitiff hind”.

Sometimes they tried their hand at writing a little verse themselves. Laura was guilty of a terrible moral story in rhyme about a good child who gave his birthday sixpence to a beggar, and Edmund wrote a poem about sliding on the ice with the refrain “Slide, glide, glide, slide, over the slippery pond”. Laura liked that one and used to sing it. She also sang one of her own, beginning, “The snowdrop comes in winter cold”, which ran, with a stanza for every flower, through the seasons, and to which she added yet another stanza every time she saw or remembered a flower hitherto neglected. One day her mother asked her what that “unked thing” she was trying to sing was about, and, in an unguarded moment, she brought out the scraps of paper on which it was written. She did not scold or even laugh at her folly; but Laura could feel that she was not pleased, and, later that evening, she lectured her soundly on her needlework. “You can’t afford to waste your time,” she said. “Here you are, eleven years old, and just look at this seam!”

Laura looked; then turned away her face to hide her confusion. She did try to sew well; but, however hard she tried, her cotton would knot and her material pucker. She was supposed to be making stays for herself from narrow strips of calico left over from cutting out larger things, which, when finished with buttons and shoulder straps would make a lasting and comfortable garment. Laura always wore such stays; but not of her own making. If she had ever finished those she was working on, they would, by that time, have been too small to go round her. She saw them thirty years later in an old trunk of oddments with the strips puckered and the needle rusted into the material half way up a seam, and remembered then the happy evening when her mother told her to put it aside and get on with her knitting.