'I have seen you look exactly like one,' said Geraldine. 'That and the pheasant both give the notion of your neck.'
'Such a set of trumpery gaudy things!' grumbled Wilmet. 'Nothing but the bee is tolerable.'
'I did think of a speckled Hamburg hen, and a nice quiet she-goat,' said Robina; 'but they are all dowdy, and would not suit Alda.'
'There's something in the theory,' said Edgar. 'That bella-donna approves itself perfectly—so delicate and stately, and yet so essentially unpoetical.'
'That Mettie takes as a compliment,' said Felix, 'only she would rather have been a potato, or a cabbage.'
'Now,' said Cherry, 'you will all know—bell-heather, the grasshopper, the lark, and the squirrel.'
'Is this the lark's crest, or the squirrel's tail?' said Felix, giving an elder brother's pull to the boy's highest wave of hair.
'Or the grasshopper's leap?' cried Lance, springing on him for a bout of buffeting and skirmishing; in the midst of which Alice was heard wondering how the riddles, as she thought them, were either made or guessed.
'They come,' said Geraldine. 'I am only afraid we shall fall into a trick of making them for everybody.'
'I wonder what you would make for me.'