A Terrible Tomboy

by Angela Brazil

'Would not a good sitting hen be really better, my dear boy?' she suggested mildly. 'I don't see what you are going to do with the young chicks when you hatch them out.'

'Oh, I'll have fixed up a foster-mother before the three weeks are up,' said Archie. 'I'm lining a shallow box with plaster of Paris, and sticking it full of feathers while it's wet. Then, if I keep it on the hot pipes, it will feel for all the world like an old hen, and I don't believe there'll be a chick that'll find out the difference!'

There seemed to be no end to Master Archie's wonderful inventions. The boy had a great talent for mechanics, and was very painstaking in carrying out all the minute details of his work. Most of his schemes were really of use in the household, though occasionally some of them were not attended with quite the success they deserved. He had hung the great dinner-bell in the cherry-tree, and fastened a string from it to his bed-post, so that he might scare the birds from the fruit in the early morning; but unfortunately he had flung out his arms in his sleep and set the bell ringing soon after midnight, bringing the neighbours hurrying up to the Willows, thinking it was an alarm of fire. He had manufactured a marvellous hat-grip, warranted to defy the windiest of weather, and presented it to the housemaid; but when the poor girl tried to take off her Sunday hat, she found it so tightly fixed to her hair that it took the combined efforts of the other servants, aided by the liberal use of a pair of scissors, to remove the construction from her head. He had fixed a fire-escape to the landing window, and nearly killed the trusting parlour-maid by letting her down in a blanket 'just for practice,' while the cook was soaked through in a sudden application of the hose-pipe to quench imaginary flames in the region of the back-kitchen.

But I think the crowning achievement was an automatic currying-brush, which was to be wound up and fixed on to the horse's back, and was to do the work 'in just half the time old Fleming takes pottering over it.'

'Don't ee, now, Master Archie—don't ee, now!' remonstrated the poor old coachman, with dismay in his soul. 'Horses is kittle cattle, and it aren't right to play no tricks with 'em!'

'Don't you be alarmed, Fleming. I guess Captain will like it just first-rate. He'll find it sort of soothing, and it'll put such a gloss on him you'll be able to see your face in his coat. If it works all right, I'll rig up an arrangement to milk the cows next.'

And the confident inventor wound up his little machine, and started it on Captain's fat back. But the old horse would have nothing to say to such a newfangled contrivance, and, with a snort of alarm, had nearly kicked through the side of his stall, sending the currying-brush flying in one direction and Master Archie head over heels in another.

'I reckon he's rather too old to catch on to it,' said the boy, determined not to own himself beaten, as he picked up the ruins of his clock-work. 'It would be best to start on a colt, and put it in as part of the training. Never mind, I can use the wheels to make an alarum, and fix it up in the harness-room, to go off at any time you like, Fleming!'

But Fleming showed such a rooted distrust for anything that was intended to 'go off,' and, indeed, such absolute abhorrence of any further mechanical contrivance in the vicinity of the stables, that Archie had transferred his attentions to the garden, where he was full of a scheme for utilizing the water power of the little stream to irrigate the soil, after the fashion of the Nile in Egypt, in a series of canals between the beds, and had already made the hose-pipe work with capital effect by means of a siphon and an old barrel.

This was a form of amusement which appealed far more to Miss Forster's mind, for her flowers suffered much from drought in summer time, and she was a keen competitor at the local horticultural shows, exhibiting some of the largest carnations and the roundest dahlias in the neighbourhood. So she watched with delight the growth of the hydraulic pump, groaning a little over the dirty boots and muddied clothes that ensued, but assuring her friends that the 'dear boy' was a perfect genius, and would make his mark in the world, and relating the story of his achievements with most unbounded pride and satisfaction.