"Chicken and boiled ham and meringues and sugar biscuits and lemonade"
(mentioning a few of Mhor's favourite articles of food), "and he tucked
them up on the sofa and they slept till morning, and got into the train
and came home, and that's all."

"Me next," said Mhor. "Suppose they didn't come home again. Suppose they
started from Oxford and went all round the world. And I met a
magician--in India that was--and he gave me an elephant with a gold
howdah on its back, and I wasn't frightened for it--such a meek, gentle,
dirty animal--and Peter and me sat on it and it pulled off cocoanuts
with its trunk and handed them back to us, and we lived there always,
and I had a Newfoundland pup and Peter had a golden crown because he was
king of all the dogs, and I never went to bed and nobody ever washed my
ears and we made toffee every day, every single day...." His voice
trailed away into silence as he contemplated this blissful vision, and
Jock, wooed from his Greek verbs by the interest of the game, burst in
with his unmanageable voice:

"Suppose a Russian man-of-war came up Tweed and started shelling
Priorsford, and the parish church was hit and the steeple fell into
Thomson's shop and scattered the haddocks and kippers and things all
over the street, and----"

"Did you pick them up, Jock?" squealed Mhor, who regarded Jock as the
greatest living humorist, and now at the thought of the scattered
kippers wallowed on the floor with laughter.

Jock continued: "And another shell blew the turrety thing off The Towers
and blew Mrs. Duff-Whalley right over the West Law and landed her in
Caddon Burn----"