ee what
they were doing.

They found them seated upon a bench in a pleasant part of the garden; it
was the same bench were Rollo had once undertaken to establish a hive of
bees. Mary was teaching Lucy how to draw pictures upon lilac leaves, and
other leaves which they gathered, here and there, in the garden.

The boys came up and asked to see what the girls were doing. The girls
did not say to them, as girls sometimes do in such cases, 'It is none of
your concern,--you go off out of the garden, we don't want you here.'
They very politely showed them their leaf sketches,--and the boys, at
the same time, with equal politeness, offered them some of their
raspberries. In the course of the conversation, as they sat and stood
there, Rollo said to his sister,

"Henry lost my fish, Mary, and ought he not to pay me?"

"Your fish?" asked Mary.

"Yes," said Rollo, "I caught a fish in a dipper."

"And how came Henry to have it?"

"O, I let him have it, to catch another. He made me."

Henry had some secret feeling that he had not done quite right in the
transaction, though he did not know exactly how he had done wrong. He
did not make any reply to Rollo's charge, but stood back, looking
somewhat confused.

"Ought he not to pay me?" repeated Rollo.

"It seems to be a case of bailment," said Mary.

"O yes," said Rollo, who now recollected his father's conversation on
that subject some days before.

"And so, you know, the question," continued Mary, "whether he ought to
pay or not, depends upon circumstances."

"Well," said Rollo, who began to recall to mind the principles which
his father had laid down upon the subject, "it was for _his_ benefit,
not _mine_, and so he ought to pay."

All this conversation about bailment, and about its being for his
benefit, not Rollo's, was entirely unintelligible to Henry, who had
never studied the law of bailment at all. He looked first at Mary, and
then at Rollo, and finally said,

"I don't understand what you mean."

So Mary explained to him what her father had said. She told him, first,
that whenever one boy intrusted his property of any kind to the hands of
another boy, it was a _bailment_; and that the question whether the one
who took the thing ought to pay for it, if it was lost, depended upon
the degree of care he took of it, considered in connection with the
question, whether the bailment was for the benefit of the bailor, or the
bailee.

"What is _bailor_ and the _bai