"Are you clever?" asked Richard.
"Yes, she is," said the witch proudly. "She writes Minor Poetry. I saw a bit by her in a magazine that had no pictures,—the bit of poetry was between an article on Tariff Reform and a statement of the Coal Situation, and it began 'Oh my beloved....' I thought it was a very beautiful bit of Minor Poetry, but somehow I couldn't make it fit in with the two articles. That worried me a little."
"If you'd try your best not to be clever I'd give you a job," said Richard, who with a rather tiresome persistence was now levitating the chicken, so that, invisibly suspended at a height of eighteen inches above the middle of the table, it dripped gravy into a bowl of daffodils. "In fact I will give you a job. I have a farm called Higgins Farm, just about half-way between sea-level and sky-level. You can be a Hand, if you like, at sixpence an hour. You can get there from Mitten Island every day quite easily, and I'll tell you how. It's just the other side of the Parish of Faery, on your right as you reach the mainland from Mitten Island. You follow the Green Ride through the Enchanted Forest, until you come to the Castle where the Youngest Prince—who rescued one of the Fetherstonhaugh girls from a giant and married her—used to live. The Castle's to let now; she is an ambulance driver in Salonika, and he a gunner—just got his battery, I believe. Below the outer wall of the Castle you will see the Daisified Path, and that leads you straight to the gate of Higgins Farm, under a clipped box archway."
"I haven't got a land outfit," said Sarah Brown. "But I saw a pair called Mesopotamian Officer's Model, with laces and real white buckskin collision mats between the knees, that would fit me, and I can pawn my——"
At that moment there was a loud report. Every one looked at the double bass, but all his strings were for the moment intact.
"A maroon," said the witch.
"My dears," exclaimed Lady Arabel, much relieved to hear that this new sensation was not supernatural. "How too dretfully tahsome with the sweet and the savoury still to come. Do you know, I promised Pinehurst—my husband—never to remain in this house during an air-raid. It was his own fault, the dear thing; he had a craze for windows; this house has more glass space than wall, I think, and Pinehurst, in his spare time, used always to be making plans for squeezing in more windows. Our room is like a conservatory—so dretfully embarrassing. So I always take my knitting across the road to the crypt of St. Sebastian's, and I'm sure you won't mind coming too. You might have brought a box of spellicans, or a set of table croquet, but I'm afraid the Vicar wouldn't like it. A nice man but dretfully particular. We must wait for the end of this piece, the first violin is so touchy."
They all waited patiently while the piece continued. It was a plain uneventful piece, composed by a Higgins relative and therefore admired in the household.
"A thing that puzzles me," said the witch, taking advantage of an emotional pause while one violin was wheezing a very long small note by itself, "is why only ugly songs are really persistent. Haven't you noticed, for instance, that a peacock, or a cat on the wall, or a baby with a tin trumpet, will give their services most generously for hours on end, while a robin on a snowy tree, or a nightingale, or a fairy——"
She was interrupted by a scuffling sound in the umbrella-stand, and Harold the Broomstick, after a moment's rather embarrassing entanglement with a butterfly net, approached, panting.