it sounded rather nice. But if a boy had done it everybody would have
laughed. Some things are all in favour of girls--others again not.
Girls can't go into the army or the navy. Most boys can't, either.
But they think they can for a year or two, and that does just as well.
They can talk big about it till the fit goes off.

Well, I got rid of Kit Seymour. She went on to school, and as she
parted from me she said: "Well, I thuppose we shall be theeing you down
there by and by!"

She meant at the school--because Elsie was there. But I had something
else in my mind. I was keen to find out whether Elsie had gone there
because of our quarrel about Harriet Caw. The fault, of course, in any
other girl, would have been Elsie's. For she would not listen to any
justification--not even to the truth. But I never blamed Elsie. I
only thought she had been led into it by old Betty Martin--Mr.
Mustard's sister--who is so ugly that it gives you a gumboil only to
look at her.

Now the school of Breckonside--Mr. Mustard's, that is--lies right up
against the woods on a sloping piece of land, from which the grass has
long been worn off by generations of children playing. There is
another little yard with some grass at the back. That is where the
girls play, and across it with its gable to the big schoolhouse is the
little class-room where Elsie was teaching.

It was right bang in the woods. So I knew very well I could lie hidden
along the branch of a tree and look in at the window.

Mean, you say! Not a scrap. Elsie and I had always been such friends,
like brother and sister, that surely I had a right to look after her a
bit. Of course, if she had known she would have let out at me--scolded
I mean. But all the same she would have found it quite natural.

So I went and got hold of a ripping good place in a kind of sunk fence.
Here I found, not a beech, but the trunk of an old willow that had bent
itself down into the dry ditch as if feeling for the water. It was
just the shape, too, and when I lay down on my face it fitted me better
than my bed. There was even a rising bit at the bank for me to hook my
feet round. You never saw anything so well arranged. The hazel bushes
hid me from above, too, and unless you fairly stepped on me there was
nothing to be seen. I had only to put aside some leafy shoots to rake
the whole three windows of the little infant school.

Mean? I tell you not a bit. Why, I was really th