THE WOULDBEGOODS
And the tin dish the Lent pie was baked in we polished with our handkerchiefs, and moved it about in the sun so that the sun might strike on it and signal our distress to some of the outlying farms.
This was perhaps the most dreadful adventure that had then ever happened to us. Even Alice had now stopped thinking of Mr. Richard Ravenal, and thought only of the lurker in ambush.
We all felt our desperate situation keenly. I must say Denny behaved like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others' turn to wave, he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice's and Noël's hands, and said poetry to them—yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it seemed to comfort them. It wouldn't have me.
He said "The Battle of the Baltic," and "Gray's Elegy," right through, though I think he got wrong in places, and the "Revenge," and Macaulay's thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he waved like a man.
I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that day, and no mouse.
The sun was low in the heavens, and we were sick of waving and very hungry, when we saw a cart in the road below. We waved like mad, and shouted, and Denny screamed exactly like a railway whistle, a thing none of us had known before that he could do.
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