ast
for us. Coming home over the downs, just upon twilight, Temple and I saw
Saddlebank carrying a long withy upright. We asked him what it was for.
He shouted back: 'It's for fortune. You keep the rear guard.' Then we
saw him following a man and a flock of geese, and imitating the action
of the man with his green wand. As we were ready to laugh at anything
Saddlebank did, we laughed at this. The man walked like one half asleep,
and appeared to wake up now and then to find that he was right in the
middle of his geese, and then he waited, and Saddlebank waited behind
him. Presently the geese passed a lane leading off the downs. We saw
Saddlebank duck his wand in a coaxing way, like an angler dropping his
fly for fish; he made all sorts of curious easy flourishes against the
sky and branched up the lane. We struck after him, little suspecting
that he had a goose in front, but he had; he had cut one of the
loiterers off from the flock; and to see him handle his wand on either
side his goose, encouraging it to go forward, and remonstrating, and
addressing it in bits of Latin, and the creature pattering stiff and
astonished, sent us in a dance of laughter.

'What have you done, old Saddle?' said Temple, though it was perfectly
clear what Saddlebank had done.

'I've carved off a slice of Michaelmas,' said Saddlebank, and he hewed
the air to flick delicately at his goose's head.

'What do you mean--a slice?' said we.

We wanted to be certain the goose was captured booty. Saddlebank would
talk nothing but his fun. Temple fetched a roaring sigh:

'Oh! how good this goose 'd be with our champagne.'

The idea seized and enraptured me. 'Saddlebank, I 'll buy him off you,'
I said.

'Chink won't flavour him,' said Saddlebank, still at his business:
'here, you two, cut back by the down and try all your might to get a
dozen apples before Catman counts heads at the door, and you hold your
tongues.'

We shot past the man with the geese--I pitied him--clipped a corner of
the down, and by dint of hard running reached the main street, mad for
apples, before Catman appeared there. Apples, champagne, and cakes were
now provided; all that was left to think of was the goose. We glorified
Saddlebank's cleverness to the boys.

'By jingo! what a treat you'll have,' Temple said among them, bursting
with our secret.

Saddlebank pleaded that he had missed his way on presenting himself
ten minutes after time. To me and Temple he breathed