'Oh, you are funny, darling,' and then with a little air of protection that is always associated in my mind with Ross and sticks of chocolate, he would give me one and say,—

'But you were raver naughty, you know; I think you'd better come in now and be sorry.'

So when the woods had 'washed' me sufficiently I would go in and say I was dutiful now if father pleased. But once when I was five and some reproof of daddy's had cut me to the heart, I added,—

'But my quick still hurts me. It's all bluggy.'

I seem to have lived the best part of my life out in the woods. In them we played our games and had our endless picnics. In them I had the great adventure which caused me to become a doormat and let my brother trample on me all his life.

When Ross and I were twelve we went out very early to spend a long day in the woods with Sam and all the dogs. We made for the lake. It was always the first item on our programme to dump the lunch and tea in a special hidyhole. While the boys were busy I decided that the one and only thing I wanted to do was to climb out and sit on the branch of a tree that overhung the water. I got halfway across it when Ross shouted to me angrily to come back, and Sam said the branch was rotten.

'I'm going to the end,' I said, 'it isn't rotten.'

'Will you come back, Meg?'

'No, I won't,' I cried, my Irish grandmother at once 'agin the government.' I just loved that crawl across that tree, because the boys were simply furious and could do nothing. It was no use coming after me if the branch were rotten, it would only have made things worse. When I got to the end I said elegantly, 'Yah, I told you it wasn't,' and as I said it the beastly thing snapped and I went into the lake with a splash. I could swim all right but hadn't had any practice with my clothes on. Sam and Ross were in after me like a flash and got me back to land, and we stood three dripping objects, two in a perfect fury with the third. Then, as my luck was dead out, we heard the horses, and there were mother and daddy, Uncle Jasper and Aunt Constance out for a morning ride. Uncle Jasper was suddenly jerked back out of the Middle Ages: Aunt Constance tumbled out of heaven, mother looked frightfully worried, and daddy lost his temper, and said it was simply abominable that two big boys of their age couldn't look after a little girl of mine. But how he reconciled that remark with his Christian conscience I don't know, seeing there was only six months difference between the eldest and the youngest—but those boys would always grow so.

Daddy ordered them to go home at once, and when they had got into dry things to wait in his dressing-room till he had leisure to give them the biggest thrashing they'd ever had yet.