window, and it creaked--creaked, and rattled across the lawn and creaked
again.

Now it was clouding over.

Back came the sun, dazzlingly.

It fell like an eye upon the stirrups, and then suddenly and yet very
gently rested upon the bed, upon the alarum clock, and upon the
butterfly box stood open. The pale clouded yellows had pelted over the
moor; they had zigzagged across the purple clover. The fritillaries
flaunted along the hedgerows. The blues settled on little bones lying on
the turf with the sun beating on them, and the painted ladies and the
peacocks feasted upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk. Miles away from
home, in a hollow among teasles beneath a ruin, he had found the commas.
He had seen a white admiral circling higher and higher round an oak
tree, but he had never caught it. An old cottage woman living alone,
high up, had told him of a purple butterfly which came every summer to
her garden. The fox cubs played in the gorse in the early morning, she
told him. And if you looked out at dawn you could always see two
badgers. Sometimes they knocked each other over like two boys fighting,
she said.

"You won't go far this afternoon, Jacob," said his mother, popping her
head in at the door, "for the Captain's coming to say good-bye." It was
the last day of the Easter holidays.

Wednesday was Captain Barfoot's day. He dressed himself very neatly in
blue serge, took his rubber-shod stick--for he was lame and wanted two
fingers on the left hand, having served his country--and set out from