piece of
poetry--only the man boiled his peas--which is quite unfair.'

'Oh, yes,' said H. O., 'and cocked hats.'

'Not cocked--cockled'--it was Alice who said this. 'And they had staffs
and scrips, and they told each other tales. We might as well.'

Oswald and Dora had been reading about the Canterbury Pilgrims in a book
called A Short History of the English People. It is not at all short
really--three fat volumes--but it has jolly good pictures. It was
written by a gentleman named Green. So Oswald said--

'All right. I'll be the Knight.'

'I'll be the wife of Bath,' Dora said. 'What will you be, Dicky?'

'Oh, I don't care, I'll be Mr Bath if you like.'

'We don't know much about the people,' Alice said. 'How many were
there?'

'Thirty,' Oswald replied, 'but we needn't be all of them. There's a
Nun-Priest.'

'Is that a man or a woman?'

Oswald said he could not be sure by the picture, but Alice and Noel
could be it between them. So that was settled. Then we got the book and
looked at the dresses to see if we could make up dresses for the parts.
At first we thought we would, because it would be something to do,
and it was a very wet day; but they looked difficult, especially the
Miller's. Denny wanted to be the Miller, but in the end he was the
Doctor, because it was next door to Dentist, which is what we call him
for short. Daisy was to be the Prioress--because she is good, and has
'a soft little red mouth', and H. O. WOULD be the Manciple (I don't know
what that is), because the picture of him is bigger than most of the
others, and he said Manciple was a nice portmanteau word--half mandarin
and half disciple.

'Let's get the easiest parts of the dresses ready first.' Alice
said--'the pilgrims' staffs and hats and the cockles.'

So Oswald and Dicky braved the fury of the elements and went into the
wood beyond the orchard to cut ash-sticks. We got eight jolly good long
ones. Then we took them home, and the girls bothered till we changed our
clothes, which were indeed sopping with the elements we had faced.

Then we peeled the sticks. They were nice and white at first, but they
soon got dirty when we carried them. It is a curious thing: however
often you wash your hands they always seem to come off on anything
white. And we nailed paper rosettes to the tops of them. That was the
nearest we could get to cockle-shells.

'And we may as well have them there as on our hats,' Alice said. 'And
let's call each