Things are often curious in this world, and coincidences are almost as common as centipedes. So Miss Rawlings was more happy than surprised when, on looking over this mansion, she counted (and to make sure counted again) exactly thirty little bedrooms, with some larger ones over for a matron, a nurse, some parlour-maids, some housemaids, some tweeny-maids and a boy to clean the button-boots and shoes. When her legal adviser explained to her that this establishment, what with the little chests-of-drawers, basins and ewers, brass candlesticks, oval looking-glasses, mahogany beds, three-legged stools, dimity curtains, woolly rugs, not to speak of chiffoniers, what-nots, hot-water bottles, soup ladles, and so on and so forth; not to mention a uniform with brass buttons for the man with whiskers at the park gate, would cost her at least six thousand a year, that bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet buzzed as if indeed it was a whole hive gone a-swarming.

“Well, now, my dear Mr. Wilkinson,” she said, “I made a little estimate myself, being a business woman, and it came to £6,004 10s. 0d. How reasonable! I shall be over four pounds in pocket.”

So, in a few weeks everything was ready; new paint, new gravel on the paths, geraniums in the flower-beds, quilts as neat as daisies on a lawn on the mahogany beds, and the thirty Barbara Allans sitting fifteen a side at the immensely long oak table (where once in Henry VIII’s time monks had eaten their fish on Fridays), the matron with the corkscrew curls at the top and the chief nurse in her starched cap at the bottom. And Miss Rawlings, seated in the South bow-window in an old oak chair with her ebony and ivory stick and her purple bonnet, smiling at her Barbara Allans as if she had mistaken Trafford House for the Garden of Eden.

And I must say every single pigtail of the complete thirty bobbed as merrily as roses in June over that first Grand Tea—blackberry jelly, strawberry jam, home-made bread, plum cake, the best beef-dripping for those who had not a sweet or a milk tooth, Sally Lunns, heather honey, maids-of-honour, and an enormous confection of marchpane, with cupids and comfits and silver bells and thirty little candles standing up in the midst of the table like St. Paul’s Cathedral on the top of Ludgate Hill in the great city of London. It was a lucky thing for the Thirty’s insides that Grand Teas are not every-day teas.

“THAT FIRST GRAND TEA”

And so, when all the thirty Pigtails had sung a Latin grace put out of English by Mr. Moffat and set to a tune composed by a beloved uncle of Miss Rawlings, who also was now no more, the Grand Tea came to an end. Whereupon the Thirty (looking themselves like yet another Crocodile with very fat joints) came and said good night to Miss Rawlings, though some of them could scarcely speak. And as Miss Rawlings knew that not all little girls like being kissed by comparative strangers, she just shook hands with each, and smiled at them as if her motherly heart would almost break. And Dr. Sheppard was Medical Adviser to the thirty little Pigtailers, and Mr. Moffat came every other Sunday to hear their catechisms.

And this was the order of the day with the Pigtails in their home. At half-past seven in Summer, and at nine in Winter, the boy in buttons rang an immense bell, its clapper tied round with a swab of cotton-wool, to prevent it from clanging too sonorously. This great quiet bell was not only to waken from their last sweet dreams the slumbering Pigtails in their little beds, but to tell them they had yet another half-hour between the blankets before they had to get up. Then, hair-brushes, tooth-brushes, nailbrushes, as usual. Then, “When morning gilds the sky,” and breakfast in the wide white room with the primrose curtains looking out into the garden. And if any Pigtail happened to have been not quite so good as usual on the previous day, she was allowed—if she asked for it—to have a large plateful of porridge, with or without salt, for a punishment. No less than ninety-nine such platefuls were served out in the first year—the Pigtails were so high-spirited. Still, it can be imagined what a thirty-fold sigh of relief went up when breakfast on December 31st was over and there hadn’t been a hundredth.

From nine a.m. to twelve p.m. the Pigtails were one and all exceedingly busy. Having made their beds they ran out into the garden and woods: some to bathe in the stream, some to listen to the birds, some to talk and some to sing; some to paint and some to play, and some to read and some to dance, and some just to sit; and some, high up in a beech-tree, to learn poems, to make up poems and even to read each other’s. It all depended on the weather. The sun shone, the rooks cawed, the green silken leaves whispered; and Miss Rawlings would stand looking up at them in their venturous perch as fondly as a cat at its kittens. There was not at last a flower or a tree or an insect or a star in those parts—or a bird or a little beast or a fish or a toadstool or a moss or a pebble that the little Pigtails did not know by heart. And the more they knew them the more closely they looked at them, and the more closely they looked at them the more they loved them and the more they knew them—round and round and round and round.