“You have stuffed squirrels?” I said.
He nodded sadly.
“Two,” he replied. “I didn’t skin the first properly, and it smelt so horrid that I buried it.”
“And the second one?”
“Oh, that didn’t look anything like a squirrel. It was more like a short, fat puppy when I had finished, only you knew it was a squirrel by its tail.—What say?”
“I didn’t speak,” I said, as he looked up sharply from where he had been leaning down into the old corn-bin.
“I thought you said something. There, that’s all I shall show you to-day,” he went on disconsolately. “I never knew they were so bad till I brought you up to see them.”
“Oh, they’re not so very bad,” I said, trying to console him by my interest in his works.
“Yes, they are. Horrible! I did mean to have a glass case for some of them, and ornament them with dried moss and grass, but I’m afraid that the more you tried to ornament these, the worse they’d look.”
This sounded so perfectly true that I could not say a word in contradiction; and I stood staring at him, quite at a loss for words, and he was staring at me, when there was a shout and a rush along the loft floor, and I saw Burr major and Dicksee coming toward us fast, and half a dozen more boys crowding up through the trap-door into the place.