Half-Past Bedtime

by Sir H. H. Bashford

Cuthbert's friend, Edward Goldsmith, was six months older than Cuthbert, but they were in the same form, which was the lowest but one, in Mr Pendring's school. Most of the other boys thought him conceited, and so did Cuthbert, and so he was. But Cuthbert had once been conceited himself, and so he was able to sympathize with him. Besides being strong too, and able to dive backward, Edward had given Cuthbert his second-best pocket-knife; and that was why Cuthbert resolved at last to introduce him to Tod the Gipsy.

That was rather a special thing to do, because Tod was rather a special sort of gipsy; and Cuthbert had never introduced him to anybody, not even to Doris, although she had asked him to. It was in the hospital, just before he had had his tonsils out, that Cuthbert had first met Tod; and Tod had told him not to be frightened, because there was no need to be, and it wouldn't do any good. Tod himself was often in hospital, because he had consumption and had lost one of his lungs; and besides that he was always getting knocked down or run over, through being absent-minded. He was tall and thin, with a lot of black hair that kept tumbling over his eyes, and his eyes were brown, like a dog's eyes, only they were brighter and always laughing.

When Cuthbert next met Tod, he had been living in his little tent on the other side of Fairbarrow Down; and Cuthbert had stayed there all night with him, and Tod had told him the names of the stars. Very early in the morning, when Cuthbert woke up, he had seen Tod kneeling in the dew, and a couple of wild rabbits nestling in his arms and smelling his clothes, just as if they had been tame ones.

Then Tod had beckoned him with his head and whistled a peculiar sweet whistle, and a hare near by had pricked up her ears and come through the grass to have her back stroked. That whistle was one of Tod's secrets, and he knew lots more, and was always learning new ones; and when Cuthbert had told him about In-between Land he said that he had been there too, by another way.

So it was rather a great thing for Cuthbert to promise Edward that he would introduce him to Tod the Gipsy; and Edward was naturally rather impatient to go and find him, and talk to him. But the difficulty was that Tod was always travelling about, and Cuthbert never knew where he was likely to be; and it wasn't until tea-time on the third Monday of October that at last they found him, quite by accident.

Owing to one of Mr Pendring's boys having won a medal for helping to save somebody's life, the whole school had been given an extra half-holiday, and Cuthbert and Edward had gone for a country walk. Already in the town most of the leaves had fallen, and were lying in dirty heaps by the roadside, and the scraps of gardens in front of the houses were sodden and empty of flowers. But out in the country, where the harvest was stacked, and men were drilling seed into the moist-smelling earth, the oaks and elms were still glowing with coppery or rusty-red leaves. The cottage gardens, too, were full of flowers—clumps of starry Michaelmas daisies, and sheaves of dark-eyed golden sunflowers, like bumble-bees on fire. But there were real fires about also, as there always are when summer is over—fires of weeds at the ends of the plough-furrows, and fires of potato stems in the kitchen-gardens; and it was over a little fire of sticks and dead leaves that they suddenly came upon Tod the Gipsy.

They were now about six miles from home, at the foot of the long range of hills, of which Fairbarrow Down, with its close-cropped turf, was the nearest to the town. Behind this the ground dipped a little, and then became a hill called Simon's Nob, and behind Simon's Nob rose the highest hill of all, known as Cæsar's Camp. From Cæsar's Camp, on a very clear day, it was just possible to see the sea; and battles had been fought on all these hills hundreds and thousands of years before. Sometimes they had been held by the ancient Britons when they were fighting against each other; and sometimes they had been held by the ancient Britons when they were fighting against the Romans. Sometimes the Romans had held them when they were attacked by the Britons, and once the Britons had held them against the Saxons; and then in their turn the Saxons had held them when they had been attacked by the Danes. After that they had slept for hundreds of years, with only the sheep to nibble their grass, and an occasional shepherd shouting across them to his shaggy and wise-eyed sheep-dog.

The fiercest battle of all had been fought on Cæsar's Camp, from which the Romans had driven away the Britons, and there was a great mound on it, covered with grass, in which the dead soldiers had been buried. But that was nearly two thousand years ago, and it had never looked more peaceful than on this autumn afternoon, with the baby moon peeping above it and growing brighter as the daylight faded. It was a steep climb to the top of Cæsar's Camp, and the hill was guarded at the bottom by a fringe of elm trees; and in front of these elm trees there was a belt of bracken, reddening with decay, and reaching to the boys' shoulders. It had been rather fun to push their way through it, startling the rabbits, and listening to the rooks; and it was in a little quarry among the elms that Tod the Gipsy had made his fire.

Close to the fire he had spread some branches and a heap of bracken to make a mattress, and over this he had thrown his blanket and the little tarpaulin that made his tent. When they first caught sight of him, he was humming a song and beating an accompaniment to himself on an empty biscuit-box:

Where do the gipsies come from?
The gipsies come from Egypt.
The fiery sun begot them,
Their dam was the desert dry.
She lay there stripped and basking,
And gave them suck for the asking,
And an emperor's bone to play with,
Whenever she heard them cry.