."

"You never do," she said, and her voice, though grumpy, was no longer
violent. "Why on earth you can't take yourselves off for the day I don't
know."

We all said, "But may we?"

She said, "Of course you may. Now put on your boots and go for a good
long walk. And I'll tell you what--I'll put you up a snack, and you can
have an egg to your tea to make up for missing your dinner. Now don't go
clattering about the stairs and passages, there's good children. See if
you can't be quiet this once, and give the good gentleman a chance with
his copying."

She went off. Her bark is worse than her bite. She does not understand
anything about writing books, though. She thinks Albert's uncle copies
things out of printed books, when he is really writing new ones. I
wonder how she thinks printed books get made first of all. Many servants
are like this.

She gave us the "snack" in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She
said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be
skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door
as if we'd been chickens on a pansy bed.

(I did not know till after I had left the farm gate open, and the hens
had got into the garden, that these feathered bipeds display a great
partiality for the young buds of plants of the genus _viola_, to which
they are extremely destructive. I was told that by the gardener. I
looked it up in the gardening book afterwards to be sure he was right.
You do learn a lot of things in the country.)

We went through the garden as far as the church, and then we rested a
bit in the porch, and just looked into the basket to see what the
"snack" was. It proved sausage rolls, and queen cakes, and a Lent pie in
a round tin dish, and some hard-boiled eggs, and some apples. We all ate
the apples at once, so as not to have to carry them about with us. The
church-yard smells awfully good. It is the wild thyme that grows on the
graves. This is another thing we did not know before we came into the
country.

Then the door of the church tower was ajar, and we all went up; it had
always been locked before when we had tried it.

We saw the ringer's loft where the ends of the bell-ropes hang down with
long, furry handles to them like great caterpillars, some red, and some
blue and white, but we did not pull them. And then we went up to where
the bells are, very big and dusty among large dirty beams; and four
windows with no glass, only shut