Page:O Douglas - Olivia in India.djvu/107

Rh climb, and, sloping as it did to the top of the wall overlooking the high-road, was greatly prized by us as a watch-tower from which we could see the world go by.

To get into our Kingdom we knocked at the Wicket Gate, murmuring as we did so:

and it opened—with a push. We hadn't an idea then, nor have I now, what the words meant. We got them out of a book called The Spanish Brothers, and thought them splendidly mysterious.

Besides ourselves, and Nont, and the Russian rabbits, there was only one other denizen of our Kingdom—a turkey with a broken leg, a lonely, lovable fowl which John, out of pity, raised to the peerage and the office of Prime Minister. I have a vivid recollection of riding in hot haste on a rake to tell the King—not in proper fairy fashion that the skies were fallen, but that Lord Turkey of Henhouse was dead.

John, I remember, always carried some fern seed in his trouser-pocket. He said it made him invisible—a delusion I loyally supported. It seems to me the sun always shone in those days, the time