BEING BEAVERS
called, and hot cakes for tea.) The second time they said they were lucky not to have been in it. And perhaps they were right. But let me to my narrating. I hope you will like it. I am going to try to write it a different way, like the books they give you for a prize at a girls' school—I mean a "young ladies' school," of course—not a high school. High schools are not nearly so silly as some other kinds. Here goes:
"'Ah, me!' sighed a slender maiden of twelve summers, removing her elegant hat and passing her tapery fingers lightly through her fair tresses, 'how sad it is—is it not?—to see able-bodied youths and young ladies wasting the precious summer hours in idleness and luxury.'
"The maiden frowned reproachingly, but yet with earnest gentleness, at the group of youths and maidens who sat beneath an umbragipeaous beech-tree and ate black currants.
"'Dear brothers and sisters,' the blushing girl went on, 'could we not, even now, at the eleventh hour, turn to account these wasted lives of ours, and seek some occupation at once improving and agreeable?'
"'I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister,' replied the cleverest of her brothers, on whose brow—"
It's no use. I can't write like these books. I wonder how the books' authors can keep it up.
What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said:
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