And, while they were shut up with Gardener in his bedroom, off she went, carrying the basket on her head, and hung her clothes carefully out—the big things on lines between the fruit trees, and the little things, such as stockings and pocket handkerchiefs, stuck on the gooseberry-bushes, or spread upon the clean green grass.
"Such a fine day as it is! they'll dry directly," said she, cheerfully, to herself. "Plenty of sun, and not a breath of wind to blow them about. I'll leave them for an hour or two, and come and fetch them in before it grows dark. Then I shall get all my folding done by bedtime, and have a clear day for ironing to-morrow."
But when she did fetch them in, having bundled them all together in the dusk of the evening, never was such a sight as those clothes! They were all twisted in the oddest way—the stockings turned inside out, with the heels and toes tucked into the legs; the sleeves of the shirts tied together in double knots, the pocket-handkerchiefs made into round balls, so tight that if you had pelted a person with them they would have given very hard blows indeed. And the whole looked as if, instead of lying quietly on the grass and bushes, they had been dragged through heaps of mud and then stamped upon, so that there was not a clean inch upon them from end to end.
"What a horrid mess!" cried the Gardener's wife, who had been at first very angry, and then very frightened. "But I know what it is; that nasty Boxer has got loose again. It's he that has done it."
"Boxer wouldn't tie shirt-sleeves in double knots, or make balls of pocket-handkerchiefs," Gardener was heard to answer, solemnly.
"Then it's those horrid children; they are always up to some mischief or other—just let me catch them!"
"You'd better not," said somebody in a voice exactly like Gardener's, though he himself declared he had not spoken a word. Indeed, he was fast asleep.
"Well, it's the most extraordinary thing I ever heard of," the Gardener's wife said, supposing she was talking to her husband all the time; but soon she held her tongue, for she found here and there among the clothes all sorts of queer marks—marks of fingers, and toes, and heels, not in mud at all, but in coal-dust, as black as black could be.
Now, as the place where the big coal had tumbled out of the barrow was fully fifty yards from the orchard, and, as the coal could not come to the clothes, and the clothes could not go without hands, the only conclusion she could arrive at was—well, no particular conclusion at all!
It was too late that night to begin washing again; besides, she was extremely tired, and her husband woke up rather worse than usual, so she just bundled the clothes up anyhow in a corner, put the kitchen to rights, and went mournfully to bed.