"And my mother told me it was stitchwort."
"My mother's always right. She knows everything!"
"And so does mine! She couldn't make a mistake!"
"You'd better ask Miss Kaye," laughed Linda, "and then she can decide between you. I've heard it called Star of Bethlehem, so that makes a third name."
Miss Kaye agreed at once with Sylvia, much to Marian's chagrin; she did not like to be put in the wrong, and indeed kept obstinately to her own opinion, and still insisted upon calling the flower saxifrage, though Miss Kaye told her she would show her a picture of it with the name underneath in her botany book when they returned.
"You must notice all the things you see or find to-day," said Miss Kaye. "I shall expect everybody to write a composition next week on the excursion."
There were certainly plenty of items for the girls to put down on their lists. A squirrel with a splendid bushy tail ran across the path, and scrambled hastily up a fir tree, peeping at them from the safety of the top branches before he made a mighty spring into an adjoining ash. A heron sailed majestically overhead, its long legs hanging like those of a stork, and its grey plumage dark against the sky. A whole flight of lapwings rose, screaming "peewit", from a field where they were feeding in company with a flock of seagulls, following the plough that a labourer was driving through the rich red earth. On a sheltered wall a lizard lay basking in the sunshine; and Linda very nearly caught him, but he whisked away in a moment, and was gone down a hole among the stones before half the class had seen him. There were lambs frisking about in the meadows, and as the girls passed through a farmyard they found a woman sitting on a doorstep feeding one from a bottle, like a baby. It had lost its mother, so she told them, and had readily accepted her as its nurse, becoming so tame that it followed her everywhere about the house, and slept in a corner of the kitchen.
"We had to feed one of our puppies at home like that," said Linda. "We used a tiny doll's bottle, and it was such fun to mix the milk and warm water, and taste it first to see if it was sweet enough. I always loved Jill much the best, but we couldn't rear her. Oswald was silly enough to give her a bath when she was too young; I don't think he dried her properly, and she took cold and died. That's generally the way with one's pets," she added with a sigh.
"So it is," said Marian. "A most dreadful thing happened to Gwennie and me. We had a lovely black rabbit, and Mother said we had better not keep it when we went to school, because the little ones couldn't look after it properly, and she wouldn't have time herself. A man in the village asked if he might buy it from us, and we thought he wanted it as a pet for his children, so we sold it to him. Then one day I met him on the road, and he said: 'Oh, Missie, that rabbit of yours was a good one! It made us two whole dinners, and a basin of broth as well.' We had never dreamt he meant to kill it, and we were so horribly sorry."
"Canaries are the worst," said Connie. "I've had three. I hung the first outside the nursery window, and the nail gave way, and the poor little fellow tumbled right to the ground and was killed. He was such a good singer, too. The cat got the second. Then I had a third, called 'Tweetie'. I let him out of his cage one day when Bertie was filing the keel of his boat, and we suppose he must have picked up some of the bits of lead, because he grew quite ill and died. I buried him under the rosebush in my garden, and Granny offered a prize to whoever could write the best piece of poetry about him, an epitaph, she called it."