of the arts of war and the tented field. And a real colonel has called him "Comrade-in-Arms," which is exactly what Lord Roberts called his own soldiers when he wrote home about them.
Albert's Uncle's Grandmother; Or, the Long-Lost
The shadow of the termination now descended in sable thunder-clouds upon our devoted nobs. As Albert's uncle said, "School now gaped for its prey." In a very short space of time we should be wending our way back to Blackheath, and all the variegated delightfulness of the country would soon be only preserved in memory's faded flowers. (I don't care for that way of writing very much. It would be an awful swat to keep it up—looking out the words and all that.)
To speak in the language of every-day life, our holiday was jolly nearly up. We had had a ripping time, but it was all but over. We really did feel sorry—though, of course, it was rather decent to think of getting back to father and being able to tell the other chaps about our raft, and the dam, and the Tower of Mystery, and things like that.
When but a brief time was left to us, Oswald and Dicky met by chance in an apple-tree. (That sounds like "consequences," but it is mere truthfulness.) Dicky said:
"Only four more days." Oswald said, "Yes."
"There's one thing," Dicky said, "that beastly society. We don't want that swarming all over everything when we get home. We ought to dissolve it before we leave here."
The following dialogue now took place:
Oswald—"Right you are. I always said it was piffling rot."
Dicky—"So did I."
Oswald—"Let's call a council. But don't forget we've jolly well got to put our foot down."
Dicky assented, and the dialogue concluded with apples.
The council, when called, was in but low spirits. This made Oswald's and Dicky's task easier. When people are sunk in gloomy despair about one thing, they will agree to almost anything about something else. (Remarks like this are called philosophic generalizations, Albert's uncle says.) Oswald began by saying:
"We've tried the society for being good in, and perhaps it's done us good. But now the time has come for each of us to be good or bad on his own, without hanging on to the others."
"The race is run by one and one,
But never by two and two,"
the Dentist said. The others said nothing. Oswald went on: "I move that we chuck—I mean dissolve—the Wouldbegoods Society; its appointed task is done. If it's not well done, that's its fault and not ours." Dicky said, "Hear! hear! I second this prop."
The unexpected Dentist said, "I third it. At first I thought it would help, but afterwards I saw it only made you want to be naughty, just because you were a Wouldbegood."
Oswald owns he was surprised. We put it to the vote at once, so as not to let Denny cool. H. O. and Noël and Alice voted with us, so Daisy and Dora were what is called a hopeless minority. We tried to cheer their hopelessness by letting them read the things out of the Golden Deed book aloud. Noël hid his face in the straw so that we should not see the faces he made while he made poetry instead of listening, and when the Wouldbegoods was by vote dissolved forever he sat up, with straws in his hair, and said:
"THE EPITAPH "The Wouldbegoods are dead and gone, But not the golden deeds they have done. These will remain upon Glory's page To be an example to every age, And by this we have got to know How to be good upon our ow—N.
N is for Noël, that makes the rhyme and the sense both right. O.W.N., own; do you see?"
We saw it, and said so, and the gentle poet was satisfied. And the council broke up. Oswald felt that a weight had been lifted from his expanding chest, and it is curious that he never felt so inclined to be good and a model youth as he did then.
As we went down the ladder out of the loft he said:
"There's one thing we ought to do, though, before we go home. We ought to find Albert's uncle's long-lost grandmother for him."
Alice's heart beat true and steadfast. She said: "That's just exactly what Noël and I were saying this morning. Look out, Oswald, you wretch, you're kicking chaff into my eyes." She was going down the ladder just under me.
Oswald's young sister's thoughtful remark ended in another council. But not in the straw loft. We decided to have a quite new place, and disregarded H. O.'s idea of the dairy and Noël's of the cellars. We had the new council on the secret staircase, and there we settled exactly what we ought to do. This is the same thing, if you really wish to be good, as what you are going to do. It was a very interesting council, and when it was over Oswald was so pleased to think that the Wouldbegoods was unrecoverishly dead that he gave Denny and Noël, who were sitting on the step below him, a good-humored, playful, gentle, loving, brotherly shove, and said, "Get along down, it's tea-time!"
No reader who understands justice and the real rightness of things, and who is to blame for what, will ever think it could have been Oswald's fault that the two other boys got along down by rolling over and over each other, and bursting the door at the bottom of the stairs open by their revolving bodies. And I should like to know whose fault it was that Mrs. Pettigrew was just on the other side of that door at that very minute? The door burst open, and the impetuous bodies of Noël and Denny rolled out of it into Mrs. Pettigrew, and upset her and the tea-tray. Both revolving boys were soaked with tea and milk, and there were one or two cups and things smashed. Mrs. Pettigrew was knocked over, but none of her bones were broken. Noël and Denny were going to be sent to bed, but Oswald said it was all his fault. He really did this to give the others a chance of doing a refined, golden deed by speaking the truth and saying it was not his fault. But you cannot really count on any one. They did not say anything, but only rubbed the lumps on their late-revolving heads. So it was bed for Oswald, and he felt the injustice hard.
But he sat up in bed and read the Last of the Mohicans, and then he began to think. When Oswald really thinks he almost always thinks of something. He thought of something now, and it was miles better than the idea we had decided on in the secret staircase, of advertising in the Kentish Mercury and saying if Albert's uncle's long-lost grandmother would call at the Moat House she might hear of something much to her advantage.
What Oswald thought of was that if we went to Hazelbridge and asked Mr. B. Munn, grocer, that drove us home in the cart with the horse that liked the wrong end of the whip best, he would know who the lady was in the red hat and red wheels that paid him to drive us home that Canterbury night. He must have been paid, of course, for even grocers are not generous enough to drive perfect strangers, and five of them too, about the country for nothing.
Thus we may learn that even unjustness and sending the wrong people to bed may bear useful fruit, which ought to be a great comfort to every one when they are unfairly treated. Only it most likely won't be. For if Oswald's brothers and sisters had nobly stood by him, as he expected, he would not have had the solitudy reflections that led to the great scheme for finding the grandmother.
Of course when the others came up to roost
