aid Pauline, the judicial look of her father in her eyes,
"that's just talk about putting it down our backs. I thought it all out
that day Muffie ate the green peach. You know Miss Bibby said then she'd
put it down her back--the castor-oil, you know. Well, if I'd been Muffie
I'd just have said, 'All right, do.' Do you think they would have done
so, and got her clothes all nasty and greasy? Not they, they think far
too much of clothes. But even if they _had_--well, it might have been a
bit sticky, but it would be better than taking stuff like that down your
mouth."

This was marvellous perspicacity of thought; Lynn looked admiringly down
at her sister, and Muffie stood, with her mouth open, digesting this
freshly-minted fact, and making clear resolutions for all future
consequences of green peaches.

They fell to playing again, Lynn remaining in the tree, however. Mrs.
Robinson now engaged in sewing skin coats with a porcupine needle and
flax, since the more active part of Fritz, shooting and shouting down
below, was fraught with too much danger.

"I can't make Tentholm, 'less I have the diny-room tablecloth," said
Muffie.

"Well, go and get it," said Pauline.

"All right," said Muffie, making a line for it, then calling back, just
as a little sop to duty, "she said we weren't to, though."

"Run up and ask her," said Lynn, a law-abiding little person so long as
the iron did not enter her soul or body.

Muffie dashed into Miss Bibby's bedroom after the briefest knock, and
made her request.

"Yes, yes," murmured Miss Bibby, looking up with bright eyes from some
writing she was engaged upon, "just this once, dear, but be careful not
to----"

But Muffie had sprung away again, and what she had to avoid with the
cloth, whether tearing it into holes, or getting mud on it, or losing
it, or wetting it, she did not wait to hear. It is possible Miss Bibby
did not even finish the sentence--her eyes looked absent-minded enough
for such a lapse.

Muffie went gleefully back to Robinson Island, the art-green serge
trailing behind her.

"We can have it, we can have it!" she announced gleefully, "only we're
to be careful not to--come on, fasten it on to the sticks, Paul."

Miss Bibby had reached the chronicle of Hugh Kinross's "endearing little
eccentricities."

A small pile of neatly written sheets lay to the right of her. In front
of her lay more sheets, scored through, corrected, polished, until
Flaubert himself would