nplace in its details
to demand description here. It need only be said that Hamlet joined in
it and ran away with Helen's letter which had blown to the ground
during the struggle, and that he ate it, in his corner, with great
satisfaction. Then, when they were at their angriest, Helen suddenly
began to laugh which she did sometimes, to her own intense annoyance,
when she terribly wanted to be enraged, then Jeremy laughed too, and
Hamlet yielded up fragments of the letter--so that all was well.

But the problem of the box was not solved--and, in the end, the only
part of the toy village that Mrs. Monk ever saw was the youngest Miss
Noah and one apple-tree for her to sit under.

II

The ritual of the journey to Cow Farm was, by this time, of course,
firmly established, and the first part of the ritual was that one should
wake up at three in the morning. This year, however, for some strange
mysterious reason Jeremy overslept himself and did not wake up until
eight o'clock, to find then that everyone was already busy packing
and brushing and rushing about, and that all his own most sacred
preparations must be squeezed into no time at all if he were to be
ready. Old Tom Collins's bus came along at twelve o'clock to catch the
one o'clock train, so that Jeremy might be considered to have the whole
morning for his labours, but that was not going to be enough for him
unless he was very careful. Grown-up people had such a way of suddenly
catching on to you and washing your ears, or making you brush
your teeth, or sitting you down in a corner with a book, that
circumnavigating them and outplotting them needed as much nerve and
enterprise as tracking Red Indians. When things were fined down to the
most naked accuracy he had apparently only two "jobs": one to accustom
Hamlet to walking with a "lead," the other to close the green box; but
of course Mary would want advice, and there would, in all probability,
be a dispute or two about property that would take up the time.

It was indeed an eventful morning. Trouble began with Mary suddenly
discovering that she had lost her copy of "Alice in Wonderland" and
rushing to Jeremy's box and upsetting all Jeremy's things to see whether
it were there. Jeremy objected to this with an indignation that was
scarcely in the sequel justified, because Mary found the book jammed
against the paint-box and a dry walnut nestling in its centre. She cried
and protested and then suddenly, with t