Next term the great idea of how to crush Cherry Ripe came to me out of the Bible. I let everybody speak first, and then, as nobody had said anything like as good, I said—
"We will do what the enemy did in the New Testament, and sow tares in his ground."
Everybody thought the idea fine but jolly difficult, and Chilvers asked—
"What are tares?"
I said I wasn't exactly sure, and Methuen said it was a sort of grass, and Trelawny said it was a parable. Anyhow, we didn't know where to buy them. Finally we decided not to ask for tares, but some sort of seed that would grow quickly, and get a deep hold of the ground, and ruin anything else for yards round. Unfortunately we didn't know much about wild things in general, and we asked Tomkins, who is our champion botanist, and he said "Willow herb." But there were no seeds about at that time of the year, it being February, and so Trelawny said—
"We will confide in Batson, who is well known to be the son of a greengrocer and seedsman."
But it happened that Batson, who was the gardener's boy at Dunstan's, was leaving to better himself. However, there was just time before he went, and we let him into our secret score against Cherry Ripe, and gave him two shillings with which to buy some seed of some vigorous growing thing to sow in Cherry Ripe's nursery garden and choke his vegetables when they came up. Batson said that he would do his best. He said it might have to be grass seed or clover, but he promised it should be a good choking thing.
Certainly it looked hopeful, because he soon brought a bag of seeds and said they were a kind of clover that, if once sown, could not be got out of the ground again without ploughing. Then came the question of the time, and we decided that next Saturday was the day. There happened to be a big game at football, but not a little one, so we were all free excepting Methuen, who kept goal for the first.
All went well, and when the match began to get exciting owing to hands being given against Bray in our 'twenty-five,' Trelawny and Pedlar and Chilvers and I went into the wood unseen and got to the Cherry Ripe side of it. Chaps had been in his field a good deal lately, hunting for a very beautiful red fungus that was to be found in the hedges, on dead sticks, and Cherry Ripe had been a good deal worried by them.
Then came the first surprise of that day. There was a huge board stuck up in the field facing our wood with these remarkable words on it—