"Good gracious, look there!" and we looked there, and where we were to look was the lowest piece of the castle wall, just beside the keep that the bridge led over to, and what we were to look at was a strange blobbiness of knobbly bumps along the top, that looked exactly like human heads.
It turned out, when we had talked about cannibals and New Guinea, that human heads were just exactly what they were. Not loose heads, stuck on pikes or things like that, such as there often must have been while the castle stayed in the olden times it was built in and belonged to, but real live heads with their bodies still in attendance on them.
They were, in fact, the village children.
"Poor little Lazaruses!" said Mr. Red House.
"There's not such a bad slice of Dives' feast left," said Mrs. Bax. "Shall we——?"
So Mr. Red House went out by the keep and called the heads in (with the bodies they were connected with, of course), and they came and ate up all that was left of the lunch. Not the buns, of course, for those were sacred to tea-time, but all the other things, even the nuts and figs, and we were quite glad that they should have them—really and truly we were, even H.O.!
They did not seem to be very clever children, or just the sort you would choose for your friends, but I suppose you like to play, however little you are other people's sort. So, after they had eaten all there was, when Mrs. Red House invited them all to join in games with us we knew we ought to be pleased. But village children are not taught rounders, and though we wondered at first why their teachers had not seen to this, we understood presently. Because it is most awfully difficult to make them understand the very simplest thing.
But they could play all the ring games, and "Nuts and May," and "There Came Three Knights"—and another one we had never heard of before. The singing part begins:—
"Up and down the green grass,
This and that and thus,
Come along, my pretty maid,
And take a walk with us.
You shall have a duck, my dear,
And you shall have a drake,
And you shall have a handsome man
For your father's sake."
I forget the rest, and if anybody who reads this knows it, and will write and tell me, the author will not have laboured in vain.
The grown-ups played with all their heart and soul—I expect it is but seldom they are able to play, and they enjoy the novel excitement. And when we'd been at it some time we saw there was another head looking over the wall.
"Hullo!" said Mrs. Bax, "here's another of them, run along and ask it to come and join in."
She spoke to the village children, but nobody ran.
"Here, you go," she said, pointing at a girl in red plaits tied with dirty sky-blue ribbon.
"Please, miss, I'd leifer not," replied the red-haired. "Mother says we ain't to play along of him."
"Why, what's the matter with him?" asked Mrs. Red House.
"His father's in jail, miss, along of snares and night lines, and no one won't give his mother any work, so my mother says we ain't to demean ourselves to speak to him."
"But it's not the child's fault," said Mrs. Red House, "is it now?"
"I don't know, miss," said the red-haired.
"But it's cruel," said Mrs. Bax. "How would you like it if your father was sent to prison, and nobody would speak to you?"
"Father's always kep' hisself respectable," said the girl with the dirty blue ribbon. "You can't be sent to gaol, not if you keeps yourself respectable, you can't, miss."
"And do none of you speak to him?"
The other children put their fingers in their mouths, and looked silly, showing plainly that they didn't.
"Don't you feel sorry for the poor little chap?" said Mrs. Bax.
No answer transpired.
"Can't you imagine how you'd feel if it was your father?"
"My father always kep' hisself respectable," the red-haired girl said again.
"Well, I shall ask him to come and play with us," said Mrs. Red House. "Little pigs!" she added in low tones only heard by the author and Mr. Red House.
But Mr. Red House said in a whisper that no one overheard except Mrs. R. H. and the present author.
"Don't, Puss-cat; it's no good. The poor little pariah wouldn't like it. And these kids only do what their parents teach them."
If the author didn't know what a stainless gentleman Mr. Red House is he would think he heard him mutter a word that gentlemen wouldn't say.
"Tell off a detachment of consolation," Mr. Red House went on; "look here, our kids—who'll go and talk to the poor little chap?"
We all instantly said, "I will!"
The present author was chosen to be the one.
When you think about yourself there is a kind of you that is not what you generally are but that you know you would like to be if only you were good enough. Albert's uncle says this is called your ideal of yourself. I will call it your best I, for short. Oswald's "best I" was glad to go and talk to that boy whose father was in prison, but the Oswald that generally exists hated being out of the games. Yet the whole Oswald, both the best and the ordinary, was pleased that he was the one chosen to be a detachment of consolation.
He went out under the great archway, and as he went he heard the games beginning again. This made him feel noble, and yet he was ashamed of feeling it. Your feelings are a beastly nuisance, if once you begin to let yourself think about them. Oswald soon saw the broken boots of the boy whose father was in jail so nobody would play with him, standing on the stones near the top of the wall where it was broken to match the boots.
He climbed up and said, "Hullo!"
To this remark the boy replied, "Hullo!"
Oswald now did not know what to say. The sorrier you are for people the harder it is to tell them so.
But at last he said—
"I've just heard about your father being where he is. It's beastly rough luck. I hope you don't mind my saying I'm jolly sorry for you."
The boy had a pale face and watery blue eyes. When Oswald said this his eyes got waterier than ever, and he climbed down to the ground before he said—
"I don't care so much, but it do upset mother something crool."
It is awfully difficult to console those in affliction. Oswald thought this, then he said—
"I say; never mind if those beastly kids won't play with you. It isn't your fault, you know."
"Nor it ain't father's neither," the boy said; "he broke his arm a-falling off of a rick, and he hadn't paid up his club money along of mother's new baby costing what it did when it come, so there warn't nothing—and what's a hare or two, or a partridge? It ain't as if it was pheasants as is as dear to rear as chicks."
Oswald did not know what to say, so he got out his new pen-and-pencil-combined and said—
"Look here! You can have this to keep if you like."
The pale-eyed boy took it and looked at it and said—
"You ain't foolin' me?"
And Oswald said no he wasn't, but he felt most awfully rum and uncomfy, and though he wanted most frightfully to do something for the boy he felt as if he wanted to get away more than anything else, and he never was gladder in his life than when he saw Dora coming along, and she said—
"You go back and play, Oswald. I'm tired and I'd like to