mrs. carnaby was one of those characters emphatically called fidgets; she never rested till each individual came back, and she never rested when they did. mr. c. was the first to return, and not in the first of tempers. he had been done out of his long-anticipated rural walk by setting his foot, before he had gone a hundred yards, on a yard of snake, and it had frightened him so that mrs. carnaby expected “it would turn his whole mash of blood, and give him the yellow jaundice.” mr. hodges came in second, but to the impatient eye of miss c. certainly did not proceed from the green man with the straightness of a bullet from a rifle. master carnaby was a good third, for he had been well horse-whipped, just as he had got three little red blackberries and
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five thorns in his fingers, by a gentleman who did not approve of his trespassing upon his grounds. boxer the bull-dog was fourth; he came back on three-legs, with his brindle well peppered with number six by the gamekeeper, to cure him of worrying park rabbits. in fact, poor boxer, as mrs. c. exclaimed, “was bleeding like a pig,” and the grateful animal acknowledged her compassionate notice by going and rubbing his shot hide against her shot silk, in return for which he got a blow quite hard enough to shiver the stick of something between a parasol and an umbrella. as for the nurse-maid and the twins they did not return for an hour, to the infinite horror of the mother; but just as they were all sitting
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down to dinner betsey appeared with her charge, walked off their feet, with their “pretty mouths all besmeared” with blue and red juice; but no one of the party was botanist enough to tell whether the berries they were munching were hips and haws, or bilberries, or deadly nightshade, but maternal anxiety made sure it was the “rank pison.” accordingly dinner was postponed, and they set to get up an extempore fire to make the kettle hot, and as soon as the water was warm enough, these “two pretty babes” were well drenched, and were soon as perfectly uncomfortable as they had been two months before in a rough steam trip to margate. as soon as peace was restored it transpired, from an examination of the children, and a very cross examination of the nurse-maid, that they had met with a real gipsy woman in the forest who had told betty’s fortune, but had omitted to prognosticate that her mistress would give her warning on the spot, and that her gipsying would end, as it actually did, in finding herself suddenly out of place in the middle of a forest. like other servants, when they lose a comfortable situation, “some natural tears she shed,” but did not wipe them soon, as did “our general mother,” for the very excellent reason that she had spread her pocket handkerchief on the ground to sit upon, somewhere between wanstead and walthamstow, and had left it as a waif to the lord of the manor.
