h more friendly
than town people. I suppose they don't have to spread their friendly
feelings out over so many persons, so it's thicker, like a pound of
butter on one loaf is thicker than on a dozen. Friendliness in the
country is not scrape, like it is in London. Even Dicky and H. O. forgot
the affair of honour that had taken place in the morning. H. O. changed
rods with Dicky because H. O.'s was the best rod, and Dicky baited H.
O.'s hook for him, just like loving, unselfish brothers in Sunday School
magazines.

We were talking fishlikely as we went along down the lane and through
the cornfield and the cloverfield, and then we came to the other lane
where we had seen the Baby. The tramps were gone, and the perambulator
was gone, and, of course, the Baby was gone too.

'I wonder if those gipsies HAD stolen the Baby?' Noel said dreamily. He
had not fished much, but he had made a piece of poetry. It was this:

'How I wish
I was a fish.
I would not look
At your hook,
But lie still and be cool
At the bottom of the pool
And when you went to look
At your cruel hook,
You would not find me there,
So there!'

'If they did steal the Baby,' Noel went on, 'they will be tracked by the
lordly perambulator. You can disguise a baby in rags and walnut juice,
but there isn't any disguise dark enough to conceal a perambulator's
person.'

'You might disguise it as a wheel-barrow,' said Dicky.

'Or cover it with leaves,' said H. O., 'like the robins.'

We told him to shut up and not gibber, but afterwards we had to own that
even a young brother may sometimes talk sense by accident.

For we took the short cut home from the lane--it begins with a large gap
in the hedge and the grass and weeds trodden down by the hasty feet of
persons who were late for church and in too great a hurry to go round
by the road. Our house is next to the church, as I think I have said
before, some time.

The short cut leads to a stile at the edge of a bit of wood (the
Parson's Shave, they call it, because it belongs to him). The wood has
not been shaved for some time, and it has grown out beyond the stile and
here, among the hazels and chestnuts and young dogwood bushes, we saw
something white. We felt it was our duty to investigate, even if the
white was only the under side of the tail of a dead r