“I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you think you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake,” said Mrs. Norbury, hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the truth.
Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.
“This must be hushed up,” said Mrs. Norbury quickly; “the servants—”
“Hushed up!” exclaimed Ada, indignantly; “I’m writing a long report on it for the Research Society.”
It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of brilliant resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his life.
“It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek,” he said, “but it would be a shame to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of ours; stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home from Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the room with a string on it, run one end of the string through the window; then we pull if from below and it comes scraping along the floor, just as you’ve described, and finally jerks out of the window. Taken in heaps of people; they all read up Popple and think it’s old Harry Nicholson’s ghost; we always stop them from writing to the papers about it, though. That would be carrying matters too far.”
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard renewed the lease in due course, but Ada Bleek has never renewed her friendship.
THE MAPPINED LIFE
“These Mappin Terraces at the Zoological Gardens are a great improvement on the old style of wild-beast cage,” said Mrs. James Gurtleberry, putting down an illustrated paper; “they give one the illusion of seeing the animals in their natural surroundings. I wonder how much of the illusion is passed on to the animals?”
“That would depend on the animal,” said her niece; “a jungle-fowl, for instance, would no doubt think its lawful jungle surroundings were faithfully reproduced if you gave it a sufficiency of wives, a goodly variety of seed food and ants’ eggs, a commodious bank of loose earth to dust itself in, a convenient roosting tree, and a rival or two to make matters interesting. Of course there ought to be jungle-cats and birds of prey and other agencies of sudden death to add to the illusion of liberty, but the bird’s own imagination is capable of inventing those—look how a domestic fowl will squawk an alarm note if a rook or wood pigeon passes over its run when it has chickens.”