My book slipped off my knees, and fell with a flump upon the grass. A minute later I rubbed my eyes and laughed, and then remembered that I had not been to fairyland after all, as Bess would have said, but that I had fallen asleep, and had been dreaming about the Masque of Flowers, a great fête that was given in honour of the marriage of the Earl of Somerset and the Lady Frances, daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, by the gentlemen of Grays Inn, in the long past year of 1613. I laughed, for I really believed, as the children say, it was all true, and Mouse, suspicious probably by my puzzled look, gave a long deep growl. My faithful friend had never left my side. Since my accident she had remained with me, troubled, and annoyed and sullen to everybody else.
Mouse had a bad opinion of the doctor (most dogs have). She did not like his carriage, and thought badly of his coachman. Just then the world for her was full of evil characters, and they taxed narrowly her powers of observation.
As I leant over the sofa to pick up my book, the oak door of the chapel hall was flung violently open, and the two children, Bess and little Hals, danced in together.
“Oh, mamsie!” they cried, for Hals had caught up Bess’s manner of addressing me. “Such fun! such fun! We did all kinds of things. We played games in the garden—Kiss in the Ring, Stag a Roarning, Bell Horses, Draw Buckets, and Shrewsbury Blind Man’s Buff, Wallflowers, Garden Jumps, and heaps of others. Aunty Constance called them ‘Shropshire games.’”
“Were they good games?” I asked.
The children were too excited to speak, but nodded their heads furiously, whilst their eyes shone with excitement.
“Can you repeat to me any of the rhymes?” I asked.
“Hals can,” answered Bess; “I can’t long remember poetry. Things fly into my head, but they soon fly out again.”
I turned to Hals, and begged him to tell me those that he could remember.
