Billy became friends with old Amos that first evening, and that sufficed, for Amos had enriched my own childhood, and I knew that nothing which could amuse or instruct would be omitted.
Billy felt that he and Jimmie, Aubrey, Captain Featherstone, and Sir Wemyss constituted the men of the household. When I asked him why he did not include Mr. Beguelin, he put his hands behind him, spread his short legs apart, and said:
"Well, you see, Miss Tats, Mr. Beguelin has just been married, and bridegrooms don't count."
Things went smoothly enough that first day while my people were becoming acquainted. Then it was Jimmie, dear blessed old, maladroit, hot-tempered Jimmie, always so completely at home in a business deal, and always so pathetically awkward and so confidently bungling in domestic crises, who supplied us with sufficient material for a book on "How Not to Prune Trees Properly."
We all went out to the apple-trees early in the morning. As usual, Sir Wemyss was dressed for the part. Why is it, I wonder, that the British always find themselves dressed for the occasion? I believe, if an Englishman were wrecked in mid-ocean, with only a hat-box for baggage, that out of that box he could produce bathing-trunks in which to drown properly.
The Angel was frankly and simply disreputable, his idea of being properly clad for farm-work being to be ragged wherever possible and faded all over. Jimmie, however, wore his ordinary business clothes, patent leather shoes, and a derby hat. And as events transpired, I was glad of it. I love to think of Jimmie pruning trees in patent leathers and a derby.
Being, as I say, confident, Jimmie, who never had seen a tree pruned, waited for no instructions, but sprang nimbly upon a barrel, and, standing on his tiptoes, reached up and snipped at the lower branches. Sir Wemyss took a ladder and his pruning-knife, and disappeared from view into the thickest part of the tree. But hearing the industry of Jimmie's scissors, he parted the branches and called out:
"I say there, old man! You are cutting off twigs. These are the things which need to go—these suckers. See?"
"Yes, Jimmie," I said, pleasantly. "You are not trimming a hedge, you know. You are—"
Alas, that accidents are always my fault! Jimmie turned to glare at me, and the treacherous barrel-head gave way, letting him down most ungently into its middle, and rasping his shins in the descent in a manner which must have been particularly trying to one of delicate sensibilities.