There were three of them Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course,
Jerry's name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may
think; and Jimmy's name was James; and Kathleen was never
called by her name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when
her brothers were pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they
were not pleased. And they were at school in a little town in the
West of England the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at
another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the
same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day.
They used to see each other on Saturdays and Sundays at the house
of a kind maiden lady; but it was one of those houses where it is
impossible to play. You know the kind of house, don't you? There
is a sort of a something about that kind of house that makes you
hardly able even to talk to each other when you are left alone, and
playing seems unnatural and affected. So they looked forward to
the holidays, when they should all go home and be together all day
long, in a house where playing was natural and conversation
possible, and where the Hampshire forests and fields were full of
interesting things to do and see. Their Cousin Betty was to be there
too, and there were plans. Betty's school broke up before theirs,
and so she got to the Hampshire home first, and the moment she
got there she began to have measles, so that my three couldn't go
home at all. You may imagine their feelings. The thought of seven
weeks at Miss Hervey's was not to be borne, and all three wrote
home and said so. This astonished their parents very much,
because they had always thought it was so nice for the children to
have dear Miss Hervey's to go to. However, they were "jolly decent
about it , as Jerry said, and after a lot of letters and telegrams, it
was arranged that the boys should go and stay at Kathleen's school,
where there were now no girls left and no mistresses except the