"THE EPITAPH
"The Wouldbegoods are dead and gone,
But not the golden deeds they have done.
These will remain upon Glory's page
To be an example to every age,
And by this we have got to know
How to be good upon our ow—N.
N is for Noël, that makes the rhyme and the sense both right. O.W.N., own; do you see?"
We saw it, and said so, and the gentle poet was satisfied. And the council broke up. Oswald felt that a weight had been lifted from his expanding chest, and it is curious that he never felt so inclined to be good and a model youth as he did then.
As we went down the ladder out of the loft he said:
"There's one thing we ought to do, though, before we go home. We ought to find Albert's uncle's long-lost grandmother for him."
Alice's heart beat true and steadfast. She said: "That's just exactly what Noël and I were saying this morning. Look out, Oswald, you wretch, you're kicking chaff into my eyes." She was going down the ladder just under me.
Oswald's young sister's thoughtful remark ended in another council. But not in the straw loft. We decided to have a quite new place, and disregarded H. O.'s idea of the dairy and Noël's of the cellars. We had the new council on the secret staircase, and there we settled exactly what we ought to do. This is the same thing, if you really wish to be good, as what you are going to do. It was a very interesting council, and when it was over Oswald was so pleased to think that the Wouldbegoods was unrecoverishly dead that he gave Denny and Noël, who were sitting on the step below him, a good-humored, playful, gentle, loving, brotherly shove, and said, "Get along down, it's tea-time!"
No reader who understands justice and the real rightness of things, and who is to blame for what, will ever think it could have been Oswald's fault that the two other boys got along down by rolling over and over each other, and bursting the door at the bottom of the stairs open by their revolving bodies. And I should like to know whose fault it was that Mrs. Pettigrew was just on the other side of that door at that very minute? The door burst open, and the impetuous bodies of Noël and Denny rolled out of it into Mrs. Pettigrew, and upset her and the tea-tray. Both revolving boys were soaked with tea and milk, and there were one or two cups and things smashed. Mrs. Pettigrew was knocked over, but none of her bones were broken. Noël and Denny were going to be sent to bed, but Oswald said it was all his fault. He really did this to give the others a chance of doing a refined, golden deed by speaking the truth and saying it was not his fault. But you cannot really count on any one. They did not say anything, but only rubbed the lumps on their late-revolving heads. So it was bed for Oswald, and he felt the injustice hard.
But he sat up in bed and read the Last of the Mohicans, and then he began to think. When Oswald really thinks he almost always thinks of something. He thought of something now, and it was miles better than the idea we had decided on in the secret staircase, of advertising in the Kentish Mercury and saying if Albert's uncle's long-lost grandmother would call at the Moat House she might hear of something much to her advantage.