242

PLAN OF SIEGE 245

THESE PARCELS WERE NOW LABELLED 248

AND PACKED HIM OFF TO PERSIA 251

TROY BECAME THE HAPPIEST TOWN 253

THE END

VIGNETTE 256

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

* * * * *

[Illustration: BILL THE MINDER]

[Illustration: Headpiece]

BILL THE MINDER

Old Crispin, the mushroom gatherer, and his good wife Chloe had ten
children, and nine of them were bad-tempered. There was Chad, the
youngest and most bad-tempered of the lot, Hannibal and Quentin the
twins, Randall with the red head, Noah, Ratchett the short-sighted, Nero
the worrit, weeping Biddulph and Knut. The only good-tempered child was
a little girl named Boadicea.

It is well known that a boy usually takes after his father, and a girl
after her mother, and these children were no exception to the rule, for
the boys all resembled old Crispin, whose temper had been rather tried,
poor man, by the early hours at which he had to rise, in order to gather
the mushrooms when they were quite new and young. On the other hand,
Boadicea could only have inherited her good-temper from Chloe, who
without doubt was the most good-tempered dame alive.

Now it is quite true that any one who cares to rise early enough in the
morning may gather mushrooms, and plenty of them, too, but those who do
so only now and again, and merely for amusement, little know the hard
life of the professional gatherer, or the skill and judgment he has to
cultivate in order to carry on his work with any success.

In the course of time Crispin became so well skilled that he could not
only tell a mushroom from a toadstool at the distance of two hundred
yards, but his hearing became so acute that he could even hear them
growing, and learnt to distinguish the sound of each as it broke through
the earth. Indeed, he had no need for any alarm to wake him from his
heavy slumbers and call him to his work in the fields. However
cautiously a mushroom made its appearance, at its first rumble, old
Crispin would jump from his hard bed, hastily dress himself, and, often
without tasting a morsel of breakfast, be out of the house and on to the
field in time to see the newcomer pop its head through the earth. This
he wo