“Dunno,” replied the boy, “but a hundred yards wants a lot of doing.”
“Wonder if I could do it,” mused Lucille, picking up a tempting egg-shaped pebble, nearly as big as her fist, and throwing it with remarkably neat action (for a girl) at the first pear-tree over the bridge that spanned the trout-stream.
At, but not into.
With that extraordinary magnetic attraction which glass has for the missile of the juvenile thrower, the orchid-house, on the opposite side of the path from the pear-tree, drew the errant stone to its hospitable shelter.
Through the biggest pane of glass it crashed, neatly decapitated a rare, choice exotic, the pride of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, released from its hold a hanging basket, struck a large pot (perched high in a state of unstable equilibrium), and passed out on the other side with something accomplished, something done, to earn a long repose.
So much for the stone.
The descending pot lit upon the edge of one side of the big glass aquarium, smashed it, and continued its career, precipitating an avalanche of lesser pots and their priceless contents.
The hanging basket, now an unhung and travelling basket, heavy, iron-ribbed, anciently mossy, oozy of slime, fell with neat exactitude upon the bald, bare cranium of Mr. Alastair Kenneth MacIlwraith, head gardener, and dour, irascible child and woman hater.
“Bull’s-eye!” commented Dam—always terse when not composing fairy-tales.
“Crikey!” shrieked Lucille. “That’s done it,” and fled straightway to her room and violent earnest prayer, not for forgiveness but for salvation, from consequences. (What’s the good of Saying your Prayers if you can’t look for Help in Time of Trouble such as this?)