said Anthea briskly, "but Martha will--not in the
night, but in a minute. Here, turn round, I'll get that knot out of your
pinafore strings."

"Wouldn't it have been degrading for Sir Wulfric de Talbot," said Jane
dreamily, "if he could have known that half the besieged garrison wore
pinafores?"

"And the other half knickerbockers. Yes--frightfully. Do stand
still--you're only tightening the knot," said Anthea.

CHAPTER VIII

BIGGER THAN THE BAKER'S BOY

"Look here," said Cyril. "I've got an idea."

"Does it hurt much?" said Robert sympathetically.

"Don't be a jackanape! I'm not humbugging."

"Shut up, Bobs!" said Anthea.

"Silence for the Squirrel's oration," said Robert.

Cyril balanced himself on the edge of the water-butt in the backyard,
where they all happened to be, and spoke.

"Friends, Romans, countrymen--and women--we found a Sammyadd. We have
had wishes. We've had wings, and being beautiful as the day--ugh!--that
was pretty jolly beastly if you like--and wealth and castles, and that
rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we're no forrarder. We haven't
really got anything worth having for our wishes."

"We've had things happening," said Robert; "that's always something."

"It's not enough, unless they're the right things," said Cyril firmly.
"Now I've been thinking"--

"Not really?" whispered Robert.

"In the silent what's-its-names of the night. It's like suddenly being
asked something out of history--the date of the Conquest or something;
you know it all right all the time, but when you're asked it all goes
out of your head. Ladies and gentlemen, you know jolly well that when
we're all rotting about in the usual way heaps of things keep cropping
up, and then real earnest wishes come into the heads of the beholder"--

"Hear, hear!" said Robert.

"--of the beholder, however, stupid he is," Cyril went on. "Why, even
Robert might happen to think of a really useful wish if he didn't injure
his poor little brains trying so hard to think.--Shut up, Bobs, I tell
you!--You'll have the whole show over."

A struggle on the edge of a water-butt is exciting but damp. When it was
over, and the boys were partially dried, Anthea said--

"It really was you began it, Bobs. Now honour is satisfied, do let
Squirrel go on. We're wasting the whole morning."

"Well then," said Cyril, still wringing the water out of the tails of
his jacket, "I'll call it pax if Bobs will."

"Pax then," said Rob