"I hope it won't be ants," Prudence said nervously. "I do hate ants."
"Aunts!" exclaimed Jerry, not understanding Prue's Scottish-Australian pronunciation. "Why the dickens should we find aunts in a river-bed? Do they all drown themselves out here? Aunts can be jolly nice too—or jolly nasty, according to circs."
"They're always nasty here," Grizzel said emphatically, "I never met a nice ant in my life. They bite like red-hot nippers."
"Bite! Oh, I see," said Jerry, "you mean black aunts," vague memories of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Aunt Chloe floating in the back of his brain. "I thought you meant white aunts. I didn't know that aborigines were as fierce as all that."
"I have never seen any white ants here," said Prudence, who called the native Australians blacks when she spoke of them and a-borry-jines when she read about them. "Uncle Jim says there are a great many in India, and they eat his books."
Jerry looked bewildered. "Of course there's lots of 'em in India," he said, "but I never heard of them eating books."
"I expect your uncle means that they devour novels," suggested Mollie.
"No, he doesn't. He says they eat a tunnel through all his books from one end to the other. And they stuff up the keyholes."
"Your uncle's aunts must be quaint old birds then," Jerry said unbelievingly.
"But they aren't birds at all, they're ants," cried Grizzel.