“But can you?”
“I should think so—badly, you know, but I’m getting better. I had to find all this out that I’m telling you, but perhaps you don’t care about it, and want to go back to the cricket-field?”
“No, no,” I cried; “I do like it.”
“That’s right. If we went back we should only have to bowl for old Eely. Everybody has to bowl for him, and he thinks he’s such a dabster with the bat, but he’s a regular muff. Never carried the bat out in his life. Like hedgehogs?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “They’re so prickly.”
“Yes; but they can’t help it, poor things. There’s lots about here. Wish we could find one now, we’d take it back and hide it in old Eely’s bed. I don’t know though, it wouldn’t be much fun now, because he’d know directly that I did it. I say, you never saw a dog with a hedgehog. Did you?”
“No,” I said.
“It’s the finest of fun. Piggy rolls himself up tight like a ball, and Nip,—that’s Magg’s dog, you know,—he tries to open him, and pricks his nose, and dances round him and barks, but it’s no good, piggy knows better than to open out. I’ve had three. Magg gets them for me. He told me for sixpence how he got them.”
“And how’s that?” I said, eager to become a master in all this woodcraft.
“Why, you catch a hedgehog first.”