the marshes, making everything look as if it had
been covered all over with the best gold-leaf--marsh and trees, and
roofs and stacks, and everything.

That evening Noel wrote a poem about it all. It began:

'Poor soldiers, why did you run away
On such a beautiful, beautiful day?
If you had run away in the rain,
Perhaps they would never have found you again,
Because then Oswald would not have been there
To show the hunter the way to your lair.'

Oswald would have licked him for that--only Noel is not very strong, and
there is something about poets, however young, that makes it rather like
licking a girl. So Oswald did not even say what he thought--Noel cries
at the least thing. Oswald only said, 'Let's go down to our pigman.'

And we all went except Noel. He never will go anywhere when in the midst
of making poetry. And Alice stayed with him, and H. O. was in bed.

We told the pigman all about the deserters, and about our miserable
inside remorsefulness, and he said he knew just how we felt.

'There's quite enough agin a pore chap that's made a bolt of it without
the rest of us a-joinin' in,' he said. 'Not as I holds with
deserting--mean trick I call it. But all the same, when the odds is
that heavy--thousands to one--all the army and the navy and the pleece
and Parliament and the King agin one pore silly bloke. You wouldn't 'a
done it a purpose, I lay.'

'Not much,' said Oswald in gloomy dejection. 'Have a peppermint? They're
extra strong.'

When the pigman had had one he went on talking.

'There's a young chap, now,' he said, 'broke out of Dover Gaol. I 'appen
to know what he's in for--nicked a four-pound cake, he did, off of a
counter at a pastrycook's--Jenner's it was, in the High Street--part
hunger, part playfulness. But even if I wasn't to know what he was
lagged for, do you think I'd put the coppers on to him? Not me. Give a
fellow a chance is what I say. But don't you grizzle about them there
Tommies. P'raps it'll be the making of 'em in the end. A slack-baked
pair as ever wore boots. _I_ seed 'em. Only next time just you take and
think afore you pipes up--see?'

We said that we saw, and that next time we would do as he said. And we
went home again. As we went Dora said:

'But supposing it was a cruel murderer that had got loose, you ought to
tell then.'

'Yes,' said Dicky; 'but before you do tell you ought to be jolly sure it
_is_ a cruel murderer, and not a chap that's taken a cake