“No. Otherwise I should have been an absurd person. None of us were found in gooseberry-bushes. Try to remember that, and don’t say I said anything about it. But these people were found there, so they were all very peculiar. One was so tall that he had to go up to the attics to brush his hair, and one was so short that he had to go down to the cellar to put on his boots; and the third had such long sight that he saw all round the world, and could thus see the back of his own head, because the world is round and he saw all round it. But he could see nothing nearer than America, unless—unless he wore spectacles. What’s that?”
“It isn’t anything,” said Daisy in a faltering tone.
Hugh thought he had heard some extraneous sound, but he did not trouble to look round.
“Now, though the castle was made of strawberries,” he said, “and there was no trouble about washing up or cleaning——”
“What happened to the stalks?” asked Jim.
“There weren’t any. They were the best strawberries, like those you see when you come down to tea with mummy.”
“Was there cream?” asked Daisy.
“Yes; it came out of sugar-taps in the wall, so that you held the strawberry under the tap and it was covered with cream and sugar, because the taps always melted very fast. That was all right. But what wasn’t all right was that the first absurd old man, whose name was Bang, was always running up to the attic to brush his hair, and the second silly old man was always sitting in the cellar to put on his boots. His name was Bing; and the third old man, whose name was Bong, was always putting on his spectacles, because he wanted to see something nearer than America. So after they had lived like this for rather more than two hundred years, it struck them that a system of coöperative and auxiliary mutualness——”
“What?” shrieked both the children together.
“I don’t know,” said Hugh. “So the tall man always lived up in the attic and brushed everybody’s hair, and the short man always lived in the cellar and tied everybody’s bootlaces, and——”