"Call the lad to come up here," she said. "But do not make any more fuss about the matter. Listen to me, Lina; we must make this all clean and nice again without letting Mrs. Stanhope know anything about it. Do you understand?"
Lina muttered something to herself and went to call Fred. When the poor lad entered his room and saw the destruction of all his carefully preserved treasures, he turned as white as chalk, and spoke not one word.
"My dear boy," said Clarissa very gently, "you need not be frightened, but I must tell you that you cannot use these drawers nor this desk for this purpose. Now, we will clean them all out, but remember that no more creatures must be brought into the house."
"Oh, my collection! my whole collection!"
"Yes, you see this is not the way to go to work to make a collection. Don't be unhappy. I will see about your getting some more creatures. But the first thing is to get this room cleaned up, and I'm sure you won't want to give us so much trouble again."
Fred glanced at the places where his most cherished treasures had been stored. His rare oleander-worms and his priceless beetles all were destroyed. The drawers all opened, the creatures all killed and spoiled. He went down stairs again, but he could not go back to the others and have them ask him why he had been sent for. He went out into the garden, and down to the seat under the lindens by the river. The thought of his specimens, his precious specimens, was too much for the poor fellow. He threw himself on the ground and poured out his sorrows in sobs and tears.
In the afternoon, when the others all ran out rejoicing in the sunshine, he hid himself in a corner of the school-room, and wrote the following letter:—
DEAR AUNTY:—You will cry when you read this, I am sure. It is all done for, my entire collection; all killed with a dust-cloth, squashed, smashed, driven out of windows, and into holes, and all by a maid-servant. As I had no boxes for them, I naturally put my specimens into the best places I could find for them. In the writing-desk in my room were ever so many little divisions, just the very thing to put different varieties into. When the maid came to clear up the room, she didn't know anything about their value, of course, and she thrust her hateful brush right in and destroyed them all. She is a savage, an ignorant savage. I did as you told me, dear aunty. Not one tiny little frog even have I carried in my pockets, not even a beetle; and this is the result. I will not tell you all the things I had found; I couldn't bear to describe them. Two such beauties of beetles—bright red wings, the body lilac blue, and glittering as any precious stone! Such a rare species! And an oleander-sphinx! And my magnificent caterpillar of the humming-bird moth!—you know, aunty, that one with yellow stripes and blue eye-spots. All trodden to death on the floor.
I must stop; the longer I think of it, the worse I feel. I will say one thing though. You may call a person "Aunty," but that doesn't make her one. When we first came here, I used to say to Fani, when he wanted anything, "Why don't you go and ask Aunt Clarissa?" and he answered more than a dozen times, "That isn't allowed here." So at last I understood, and as I didn't want to lead him to do anything out of the way, I didn't say it any more. But now you see the difference between a real aunt and a make-believe one. There is nothing in the world that we can't ask you. If you can't do it, you say so, and there's the end of it. But that's no reason for not asking another time; there is always something to ask, and you understand that, and don't expect us to stop asking just because you have to say no sometimes. Now, this whole trouble comes from this; for when I asked Fani to ask Aunt Clarissa to give me some twenty or thirty old boxes to keep my specimens in, he said it was not proper to ask for so many things, and I could pack them in paper. Just think of that! To wrap living creatures up in paper! Of course Fani doesn't understand anything about such things.
Now what I want you to do, dear aunty, is to write in your next letter that we are to come home; it is high time. It is four weeks since we came, and that is long enough to be away from home; for home is the best place in the whole world. There are plenty of boxes to be had there, and everything that you want, and there are nice places for things, and there isn't such danger of accidents. And if anything does go wrong, you are there, aunty, and in a minute it is set right again. Do write and say that we may leave here on Saturday, and then on Sunday we shall be at home again. How glad we shall be! Good-bye, dear aunty; your ever-loving nephew,