Faith and Phoena were standing with eyes and mouth wide open, and fixed in a rigid stare, whilst Hubert and Marygold were backing like the traditional crabs.
“What is it? What is it?” they all asked.
“Why, it’s your brother, Andrew, doing penance, my dears,” said the farmer. “Take a nearer look at him.”
In the middle of the orchard was a big, artificial mound, surmounted by a flagstaff.
This table-mountain, as Phoena had christened it, had been described by Marygold, in a letter to her mother, as being “a mile high,” and affording a view “all over the country.”
As a matter of fact, it was about twenty feet high, and from its top you could command a good view of the lane, which ran alongside of the orchard. But though the surface of the mound was now so thickly overgrown with coarse weeds and grass, that to the unknowing it might almost appear a natural hillock, it was really entirely made up of broken brick-bats, and crockery, and all the other miscellaneous objects which go to form a rubbish heap. But it was a rubbish heap of ancient date, and of very literal long-standing.
It was this table mountain that Mr. Busson had selected as the theatre of Andrew’s punishment. A wide-bottomed tub, turned topsy-turvy, was set at the foot of the flag-staff, and in the middle of the tub was placed a chair, and on the chair was what appeared to be a monster straw bee-hive.
It was of the old-fashioned extinguisher shape, wide at the edge of the skirt—as the cottagers term it—whence three wooden legs projected, and tapering upwards into quite a narrow circumference round the neck.
Above this neck, and struggling out of a thick garnish of stiff, struggling straws, Andrew’s head was just apparent. In front of the brim of his straw hat was a huge card, bearing the words, in Nanny’s largest writing, “Who would be a curious boy?”
A further decoration was added to the hat, in the shape of Libbie’s scorched and rent apron, which was spread over it after the fashion of those cloths which sometimes serve to protect hives from the undue heat.