Everybody laughed at this, except the existing baby, and it was asleep on the waggonette cushions, under the white may-tree, and perhaps if it had been awake it wouldn't have laughed, for Oswald himself, though possessing a keen sense of humour, did not see anything to laugh at.
Mr. Red House made a speech after dinner, and said drink to the health of everybody, one after the other, in currant wine, which was done, beginning with Mrs. Bax and ending with H.O.
Then he said—
"Somnus, avaunt! What shall we play at?" and nobody, as so often happens, had any idea ready. Then suddenly Mrs. Red House said—
"Good gracious, look there!" and we looked there, and where we were to look was the lowest piece of the castle wall, just beside the keep that the bridge led over to, and what we were to look at was a strange blobbiness of knobbly bumps along the top, that looked exactly like human heads.
It turned out, when we had talked about cannibals and New Guinea, that human heads were just exactly what they were. Not loose heads, stuck on pikes or things like that, such as there often must have been while the castle stayed in the olden times it was built in and belonged to, but real live heads with their bodies still in attendance on them.
They were, in fact, the village children.
"Poor little Lazaruses!" said Mr. Red House.
"There's not such a bad slice of Dives' feast left," said Mrs. Bax. "Shall we——?"
So Mr. Red House went out by the keep and called the heads in (with the bodies they were connected with, of course), and they came and ate up all that was left of the lunch. Not the buns, of course, for those were sacred to tea-time, but all the other things, even the nuts and figs, and we were quite glad that they should have them—really and truly we were, even H.O.!