For instance, it was very cold, and the school-room window was open, so she would say in Frankingle—
"Dispeach yourself to ferm the feneeter, Gogo. It geals to pier-fend! we shall be inrhumed!" or else, if I failed to immediately understand—"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes—maque aste et chute le vindeau; mais chute—le donc vite! Je snize déjà!" which was Inglefrank.
With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated, English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in print, will not be so easily taken in.
When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into the park, where we always had a good time—lying in ambush for red Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which we would hatch at home—that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they always died!), the dog Médor, and any other dog who chose; not to mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony—the smallest pony that had ever been!
Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other. Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, moult tristement!
On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we got near enough for Médor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after stones, and liked to show it off.
There we would catch huge olive-colored water-beetles, yellow underneath; red-bellied newts; green frogs, with beautiful spots and a splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the new railway and the trains—an inexhaustible subject of wonder and delight—and eat ices at the "Tête Noire" (a hotel which had been the scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause célèbre); and we would come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil. Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across the path, from thicket to thicket, and Médor would go mad again and wake the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the course of construction.
[Illustration]
He had not the gift of catching roebucks!