such a parrot. For Alice says that Oswald and
Dicky and she shall have the parrot between them.

She is tremendously straight. I often wonder why she was made a girl.
She's a jolly sight more of a gentleman than half the boys at our
school.

_THE YOUNG ANTIQUARIES_

THIS really happened before Christmas, but many authors go back to
bygone years for whole chapters, and I don't see why I shouldn't.

It was one Sunday--the Somethingth Sunday in Advent, I think--and Denny
and Daisy and their father and Albert's uncle came to dinner, which is
in the middle of the day on that day of rest and the same things to eat
for grown-ups and us. It is nearly always roast beef and Yorkshire, but
the puddings and vegetables are brightly variegated and never the same
two Sundays running.

At dinner some one said something about the coat-of-arms that is on the
silver tankards which once, when we were poor and honest, used to stay
at the shop having the dents slowly taken out of them for months and
months. But now they are always at home and are put at the four corners
of the table every day, and any grown-up who likes can drink beer out of
them.

After some talk of the sort you don't listen to, in which bends and
lioncels and gules and things played a promising part, Albert's uncle
said that Mr. Turnbull had told him something about that coat-of-arms
being carved on a bridge somewhere in Cambridgeshire, and again the
conversation wandered into things like Albert's uncle had talked about
to the Maidstone Antiquarian Society the day they came over to see his
old house in the country and we arranged the time-honoured Roman remains
for them to dig up. So, hearing the words king-post and mullion and
moulding and underpin, Oswald said might we go; and we went, and took
our dessert with us and had it in our own common-room, where you can
roast chestnuts with a free heart and never mind what your fingers get
like.

When first we knew Daisy we used to call her the White Mouse, and her
brother had all the appearance of being one too, but you know how
untruthful appearances are, or else it was that we taught him happier
things, for he certainly turned out quite different in the end; and she
was not a bad sort of kid, though we never could quite cure her of
wanting to be "ladylike"--that is the beastliest word there is, I think,
and Albert's uncle says so, too. He says if a girl can't be a lady it's
not worth while to be only like on