The Eagle's Nest

by S. E. Cartwright

The audience was positively struck dumb by the magnificent ingenuity of this new idea. The clanging sound of a large bell at last broke the silence.

"Oh, dear! There is dinner in five minutes!" sighed Betty, wriggling out of her narrow seat. "And I upset the ink-bottle over my hands, so that they will take longer to wash than usual, and there will be no time to hear the rest of your plan now, because I promised to bring Miss Thompson in a bunch of golden-chains." And she began pulling down the lowest boughs of the laburnum by swinging upon them with all her weight.

"All right!" said Madge good-naturedly; "I'll help." Climbing down to the ground, she began to tear large sprays of golden blossom off the boughs lowered by Betty's weight. "There, I should think that's enough!" she said, when her two hands were full to overflowing. "Now we had better run in, or we shall be late and lose our punctuality marks! But first I will tell you both one more thing. I have even thought of a name for this house in the tree. The Eagle's Nest. What do you say to that?" But the twins' admiration and enthusiasm for their elder sister could not find a vent in mere words.

CHAPTER III.

THE EAGLE'S NEST.

A good name is half the battle. That the Eagle's Nest was going to be a magnificent success all the children felt at once. Fortunately it was Saturday, and there were no lessons to be done after dinner, so they had a whole long afternoon in which to lay the foundations of their new house.

When Captain West married and left the navy, many years before our story begins, he had bought Beechgrove and the little farm attached to the house. So his children had no lack of fields and outhouses in which to play, directly they were old enough for Nurse to trust them out of her sight. The only rule that they were bound to observe was: Never to go off their father's property. This was not often felt to be an oppressive regulation, for the dozen fields of which the farm consisted contained untold treasures, in the way of hedges rich in birds' nests, and green slimy ponds alive with newts and tadpoles. The fact was, that the children had never yet found any day long enough to explore the fields to their entire satisfaction.

But there was one corner of the Beechgrove farm which seemed more mysteriously interesting than all the rest. In the first place, it was at an immense distance from the house; a grown-up person on a hot day would very likely have taken nearly a quarter of an hour to walk there. The children, of course, took much longer; they never went straight anywhere, and even if they started to run they forgot half-way where they were going, and wandered off in several directions, after passing objects of interest, before they remembered. So, excepting on long summer afternoons, they very seldom got as far as this particular corner, where the beech-trees grew in such abundance as to give their name to the whole place.

There was another reason as well as its remoteness from civilization which made the children regard this corner with a peculiarly awe-struck interest. On the other side of the high wall which bounded the farm at this end lived an old lady, about whom most extraordinary stories were told. She was undoubtedly eccentric and fond of seclusion, as she had spent a large sum of money on fencing her little property entirely round with a stone wall about ten feet high. Also, she never went for walks; and it was said that tradesmen's carts were not admitted into the garden, but had to wait outside on the road while the old housekeeper carried all they brought through a door in the wall, which she carefully closed behind her. Nobody but the clergyman and the doctor had been admitted to see Mrs. Howard for years; and they were neither of them gossips, so the neighbourhood did not learn much after their visits. Some people said that the old lady was mad; others that she had committed some terrible crime for which she had been sentenced to imprisonment for life, but that being very rich, she had been allowed to escape this disgrace on condition of paying a huge fine and promising never to go outside those gloomy high walls.