e, filled the barrow and wheeled
it off to the corner where the grass was to lie to be out of the way. It
was beginning to be rather hot, though still quite early, and Ted's face
grew somewhat red with his exertions as he ran beside David.

"You better ride now; jump in, Master Ted," said the gardener, when his
barrow was empty. So he lifted him in and wheeled him back to the lawn,
which was _quite_ after Ted's own heart.

"Isn't thoo going to cut with thoo's big scissors?" said Ted after a
while.

"It is want oiling," said David, "and I forget to do them. I shall leave
the borders till after dinner,--ay, sure," and he was going on with his
scything when suddenly a voice was heard from the house calling him.

"David, David, you're wanted," said the voice, and then the cook made
her appearance at the side of the house. "There's a note to take
to----."

They could not hear to where, but David had to go. He glanced round him,
and, afraid of Ted's experiments, shouldered his scythe and walked off
with it for fear of accidents.

"Are you going in, Master Ted?" he asked.

"Nurse is going to call me when she's ready," said Ted composedly, and
knowing that the little fellow often played about by himself for a
while, good David left him without any more anxiety. He had got his
scythe safe, he never thought of the big pair of shears he had left
lying in the grass!

Now these gigantic "scissors" as he called them had always had a
wonderful attraction for Ted. He used to think how funny they would look
beside the very tiny fine pair his mother worked with--the pretty
scissors that lay in her little case lined with velvet and satin. Ted
had not, in those days, heard of Gulliver and his strange adventures,
but if he had, one might have imagined that to his fancy the two pairs
of scissors were like a Brobdignag and a Lilliputian. And no sooner had
David disappeared than unfortunately the great scissors caught his eyes.

"Zem's still sticked fast," he said to himself. "David says zem needs
oil. Wiss I had some oil. P'raps the fissy oil to make Ted grow big
would do. But the scissors is big enough. Ted wonders if the fissy oil
would make zem bigger. Zem _couldn't_ be much bigger."

Ted laughed a little to himself at the funny fancy. Then he sat and
stared at the scissors. What did they remind him of? Ah yes, they were
like the shears of "the great, long, red-legged scissor man," in the
wonderful story of "Conrad Suck-a-thumb