The Greatest Works of E. Nesbit (220+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). Эдит Несбит
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Название: The Greatest Works of E. Nesbit (220+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition)
Автор: Эдит Несбит
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9788027221431
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We never had so much fuss made over us in all our lives. I think it was that that upset our calmness, and seemed to put us into a sort of silly dream that made us not see what idiots we were to hurry off from scenes we should never again behold. So we went. And the youthful Celestial saw us safely to the top of Bullamy's Stairs, and left us there with the parrot and floods of words that seemed all to end in double "e."
We wanted to show him to the others, but he would not come, so we rejoined our anxious relations without him.
The scene of rejoinder was painful, at first because they were most frightfully sick at us having been such an age away; but when we let them look at the parrot, and told them about the fight, they agreed that it was not our fault, and we really had been unavoidably detained.
But Dora said, "Well, you may say I'm always preaching, but I don't think Father would like Alice to be fighting street boys in Millwall."
"I suppose you'd have run away and let the old man be killed," said Dicky, and peace was not restored till we were nearly at Greenwich again.
We took the tram to Greenwich Station, and then we took a cab home (and well worth the money, which was all we now had got, except fourpence-halfpenny), for we were all dog-tired.
And dog-tired reminds me that we hadn't found Pincher, in spite of all our trouble.
Miss Blake, who is our housekeeper, was angrier than I have ever seen her. She had been so anxious that she had sent the police to look for us. But, of course, they had not found us. You ought to make allowances for what people do when they are anxious, so I forgive her everything, even what she said about Oswald being a disgrace to a respectable house. He owns we were rather muddy, owing to the fight.
And when the jaw was over and we were having tea—and there was meat to it, because we were as near starving as I ever wish to be—we all ate lots. Even the thought of Pincher could not thwart our bold appetites, though we kept saying, "Poor old Pincher!" "I do wish we'd found him," and things like that. The parrot walked about among the tea-things as tame as tame. And just as Alice was saying how we'd go out again to-morrow and have another try for our faithful hound there was a scratching at the door, and we rushed—and there was Pincher, perfectly well and mad with joy to see us.
H.O. turned an abrupt beetroot colour.
"Oh!" he said.
We said, "What? Out with it."
And though he would much rather have kept it a secret buried in his breast, we made him own that he had shut Pincher up yesterday in the empty rabbit-hutch when he was playing Zoological Gardens and forgotten all about it in the pleasures of our cousin having left us.
So we need not have gone over the water at all. But though Oswald pities all dumb animals, especially those helplessly shut in rabbit-hutches at the bottoms of gardens, he cannot be sorry that we had such a Celestial adventure and got hold of such a parrot. For Alice says that Oswald and Dicky and she shall have the parrot between them.
She is tremendously straight. I often wonder why she was made a girl. She's a jolly sight more of a gentleman than half the boys at our school.
The Young Antiquaries
This really happened before Christmas, but many authors go back to bygone years for whole chapters, and I don't see why I shouldn't.
It was one Sunday—the Somethingth Sunday in Advent, I think—and Denny and Daisy and their father and Albert's uncle came to dinner, which is in the middle of the day on that day of rest and the same things to eat for grown-ups and us. It is nearly always roast beef and Yorkshire, but the puddings and vegetables are brightly variegated and never the same two Sundays running.
At dinner some one said something about the coat-of-arms that is on the silver tankards which once, when we were poor and honest, used to stay at the shop having the dents slowly taken out of them for months and months. But now they are always at home and are put at the four corners of the table every day, and any grown-up who likes can drink beer out of them.
After some talk of the sort you don't listen to, in which bends and lioncels and gules and things played a promising part, Albert's uncle said that Mr. Turnbull had told him something about that coat-of-arms being carved on a bridge somewhere in Cambridgeshire, and again the conversation wandered into things like Albert's uncle had talked about to the Maidstone Antiquarian Society the day they came over to see his old house in the country and we arranged the time-honoured Roman remains for them to dig up. So, hearing the words king-post and mullion and moulding and underpin, Oswald said might we go; and we went, and took our dessert with us and had it in our own common-room, where you can roast chestnuts with a free heart and never mind what your fingers get like.
When first we knew Daisy we used to call her the White Mouse, and her brother had all the appearance of being one too, but you know how untruthful appearances are, or else it was that we taught him happier things, for he certainly turned out quite different in the end; and she was not a bad sort of kid, though we never could quite cure her of wanting to be "ladylike"—that is the beastliest word there is, I think, and Albert's uncle says so, too. He says if a girl can't be a lady it's not worth while to be only like one—she'd better let it alone and be a free and happy bounder.
But all this is not what I was going to say, only the author does think of so many things besides the story, and sometimes he puts them in. This is the case with Thackeray and the Religious Tract Society and other authors, as well as Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Only I don't suppose you have ever heard of her, though she writes books that some people like very much. But perhaps they are her friends. I did not like the one I read about the Baronet. It was on a wet Sunday at the seaside, and nothing else in the house but Bradshaw and "Elsie; or like a——" or I shouldn't have. But what really happened to us before Christmas is strictly the following narrative.
"I say," remarked Denny, when he had burned his fingers with a chestnut that turned out a bad one after all—and such is life—and he had finished sucking his fingers and getting rid of the chestnut, "about these antiquaries?"
"Well, what about them?" said Oswald. He always tries to be gentle and kind to Denny, because he knows he helped to make a man of the young Mouse.
"I shouldn't think," said Denny, "that it was so very difficult to be one."
"I don't know," said Dicky. "You have to read very dull books and an awful lot of them, and remember what you read, what's more."
"I don't think so," said Alice. "That girl who came with the antiquities—the one Albert's uncle said was upholstered in red plush like furniture—she hadn't read anything, you bet."
Dora said, "You ought not to bet, especially on Sunday," and Alice altered it to "You may be sure."
"Well, but what then?" Oswald asked Denny. "Out with it," for he saw that his youthful friend had got an idea and couldn't get it out. You should always listen patiently to the ideas of others, no matter how silly you expect them to be.
"I do wish you wouldn't hurry me so," said Denny, snapping his fingers anxiously. And we tried to be patient.
"Why shouldn't we be them?" Denny said СКАЧАТЬ