understand--"Gogo, il frise a splitter les stonnes--maque aste et chute
le vindeau; mais chute--le donc vite! Je snize deja!" which was
Inglefrank.

With this contrivance we managed to puzzle and mystify the uninitiated,
English and French alike. The intelligent reader, who sees it all in
print, will not be so easily taken in.

When Mimsey was well enough, she would come with my cousins and me into
the park, where we always had a good time--lying in ambush for red
Indians, rescuing Madge Plunket from a caitiff knight, or else hunting
snakes and field-mice and lizards, and digging for lizard's eggs, which
we would hatch at home--that happy refuge for all manner of beasts, as
well as little boys and girls. For there were squirrels, hedgehogs, and
guinea-pigs; an owl, a raven, a monkey, and white mice; little birds
that had strayed from the maternal nest before they could fly (they
always died!), the dog Medor, and any other dog who chose; not to
mention a gigantic rocking-horse made out of a real stuffed pony--the
smallest pony that had ever been!

Often our united high spirits were too boisterous for Mimsey. Dreadful
headaches would come on, and she would sit in a corner, nursing a
hedgehog with one arm and holding her thumb in her mouth with the other.
Only when we were alone together was she happy, and then, _moult
tristement!_

On summer evenings whole parties of us, grown-up and small, would walk
through the park and the Bois de Boulogne to the "Mare d'Auteuil"; as we
got near enough for Medor to scent the water, he would bark and grin and
gyrate, and go mad with excitement, for he had the gift of diving after