Everyone brightened up at this. It was our duty and it was interesting too. This is very uncommon.
So we went out to where the orchard is, at the other side of the moat. There were gooseberries and things on the bushes, but we did not take any till we had asked if we might. Alice went and asked. Mrs Pettigrew said, ‘Law! I suppose so; you’d eat ‘em anyhow, leave or no leave.’
She little knows the honourable nature of the house of Bastable. But she has much to learn.
The orchard slopes gently down to the dark waters of the moat. We sat there in the sun and talked about dragging the moat, till Denny said, ‘How DO you drag moats?’
And we were speechless, because, though we had read many times about a moat being dragged for missing heirs and lost wills, we really had never thought about exactly how it was done.
‘Grappling-irons are right, I believe,’ Denny said, ‘but I don’t suppose they’d have any at the farm.’
And we asked, and found they had never even heard of them. I think myself he meant some other word, but he was quite positive.
So then we got a sheet off Oswald’s bed, and we all took our shoes and stockings off, and we tried to see if the sheet would drag the bottom of the moat, which is shallow at that end. But it would keep floating on the top of the water, and when we tried sewing stones into one end of it, it stuck on something in the bottom, and when we got it up it was torn. We were very sorry, and the sheet was in an awful mess; but the girls said they were sure they could wash it in the basin in their room, and we thought as we had torn it anyway, we might as well go on. That washing never came off.
‘No human being,’ Noel said, ‘knows half the treasures hidden in this dark tarn.’
And we decided we would drag a bit more at that end, and work gradually round to under the dairy window where the milk-pan was. We could not see that part very well, because of the bushes that grow between the cracks of the stones where the house goes down into the moat. And opposite the dairy window the barn goes straight down into the moat too. It is like pictures of Venice; but you cannot get opposite the dairy window anyhow.