“Think they would start me if they knowed, lad?”
“I’m sure of it,” I said earnestly. “Sir Francis is so particular.”
“Then,” he said, scraping his spade fiercely, “it won’t do. I want to stop here. I’ll turn over a noo leaf.”
One day in the next autumn, as I was carefully shutting in a pill-box a moth that I had found, a gentleman who was staying at the house caught sight of me and asked to see it.
“Ah, yes!” he said. “Goat-moth, and a nice specimen. Do you sugar?”
“Do I sugar, sir?” I said vacantly. “Yes, I like sugar, sir.”
“Bless the lad!” he said, laughing. “I mean sugar the trees. Smear them with thick sugar and water or treacle, and then go round at night with a lantern; that’s the way to catch the best moths.”
I was delighted with the idea and was not long before I tried it, and as luck would have it, there was an old bull’s-eye lantern in the tool-house that Mr Solomon used when he went round to the furnaces of a night.
I remember well one evening, just at leaving-off time, taking my bottle of thick syrup and brush from the tool-house shelf, and slipping down the garden and into the pear-plantation where the choice late fruit was waiting and asking daily to be picked.
Mr Solomon was very proud of his pears, and certainly some of them grew to a magnificent size.