"Don't hurry me. I'll tell you directly. Let me think a minute."
Then he shut his pale pink eyelids a moment in thought, and then opened them and stood up on the straw and said very fast:
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, or if not ears, pots. You know we've been told that they are going to open the barrow, to look for Roman remains to-morrow. Don't you think it seems a pity they shouldn't find any?"
"Perhaps they will," Dora said. But Oswald saw, and he said, "Primus! Go ahead, old man."
The Dentist went ahead.
"In The Daisy Chain," he said, "they dug in a Roman encampment, and the children went first and put some pottery there they'd made themselves, and Harry's old medal of the Duke of Wellington. The doctor helped them to some stuff to partly efface the inscription, and all the grown-ups were sold. I thought we might:
"You may break, you may shatter
The vase if you will;
But the scent of the Romans
Will cling round it still."
Denny sat down amid applause. It really was a great idea, at least for him. It seemed to add just what was wanted to the visit of the Maidstone Antiquities. To sell the Antiquities thoroughly would be indeed splendiferous. Of course, Dora made haste to point out that we had not got an old medal of the Duke of Wellington, and that we hadn't any doctor who would "help us to stuff to efface," and etcetera; but we sternly bade her stow it. We weren't going to do exactly like those Daisy Chain kids.
The pottery was easy. We had made a lot of it by the stream—which was the Nile when we discovered its source—and dried it in the sun, and then baked it under a bonfire, like in Foul Play. And most of the things were such queer shapes that they would have done for almost anything—Roman or Greek, or even Egyptian or antediluvian, or household milk-jugs of the cave-men, Albert's uncle said. The pots were, fortunately, quite ready and dirty, because we had already buried them in mixed sand and river mud to improve the color, and not remembered to wash it off.
So the Council at once collected it all—and some rusty hinges and some brass buttons and a file without a handle; and the girl Councillors carried it all concealed in their pinafores, while the men members carried digging tools. H. O. and Daisy were sent on ahead as scouts to see if the coast was clear. We have learned the true usefulness of scouts from reading about the Transvaal War. But all was still in the hush of evening sunset on the Roman ruin.