"I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John."
"But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out after a heavy snowfall?"
"Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice.
"Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at the back of the house if you don't use them?"
John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan.
"There's a river, too," Harold observed.
"You can't toboggan down a river—unless, of course, it gets frozen over."
"I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."
John, after a brief vision of a canoe being towed across the Atlantic by the Murmania, felt that he was being subjected to the lawless exactions of a brigand, but could think of nothing more novel in the way of defiance than:
"Go away now and be a good boy."