The idea was a charming one, but it was not carried out. For on their way to the kitchen garden, Hubert pulled Marygold back.
“Look! look!” he gasped, pointing to the end of the big orchard, “there are some wild beasts.”
Following the direction of his frantically waving arm, Marygold descried the black backs of some dozen little pigs, bobbing up and down in the high grass and looking like a shoal of porpoises leaping in the sea.
“They’re only pigs, little pigs,” said Marygold; but fired by a spirit of adventure, Hubert dashed off in pursuit, declaring that “of course, they were big, wild boars.”
But he was treading unknown ground, and although he was not “infirm and old,” like the minstrel in his poetry-book, he was young and not very steady on his feet, and presently the stump of one of those “buried-alive trees” proved fatal to his further progress. With a sudden yell he tottered and fell downwards amongst the grass.
Marygold, who had followed on his heels, was quickly helping Hubert to rise, questioning him anxiously as to the extent of his injuries, when from the depths of a dry ditch, which skirted two sides of the orchard, an odd little figure suddenly appeared and slowly advanced to the scene of Hubert’s disaster.
There was a droll mixture of curiosity and anxiety on Gaston’s small sallow face as he approached this detachment of the dreaded invaders.
Libbie had given him his breakfast in the dairy that morning, when she found that he was too nervous to face the new-comers; and since then Gaston had betaken himself to the shelter of the big ditch in this remote orchard, making sure that there, at any rate, he would be left to his own company and that of the little pigs.
For the latter he entertained quite a warm affection.
But Hubert’s cry of distress had lured him out of his retreat, and having satisfied himself that he was bigger than either Marygold or her cousin, his fears for his own safety abated.