I got jolly sick of capital B’s and D’s before sunset on the morrow. That night, just as the others were falling asleep, Oswald said—
‘I say.’
‘Well,’ retorted his brother.
‘There is one thing about it,’ Oswald went on, ‘it does show it was a rattling good dam anyhow.’
And filled with this agreeable thought, the weary beavers (or explorers, Polar or otherwise) fell asleep.
CHAPTER 8. THE HIGH-BORN BABE
It really was not such a bad baby—for a baby. Its face was round and quite clean, which babies’ faces are not always, as I daresay you know by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was trimmed with real lace, whatever that may be—I don’t see myself how one kind of lace can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by itself in the lane that leads to the mill.
‘I wonder whose baby it is,’ Dora said. ‘Isn’t it a darling, Alice?’
Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.