Page:Oswald Bastable and Others - Nesbit.djvu/60

42 all over with the best gold-leaf—marsh and trees, and roofs and stacks, and everything.

That evening Noël wrote a poem about it all. It began:

Oswald would have licked him for that—only Noël is not very strong, and there is something about poets, however young, that makes it rather like licking a girl. So Oswald did not even say what he thought—Noël cries at the least thing. Oswald only said, 'Let's go down to our pigman.'

And we all went except Noël. He never will go anywhere when in the midst of making poetry. And Alice stayed with him, and H. O. was in bed. We told the pigman all about the deserters, and about our miserable inside remorsefulness, and he said he knew just how we felt.

'There's quite enough agin a pore chap that's made a bolt of it without the rest of us a-joinin' in,' he said. 'Not as I holds with deserting—mean trick I call it. But all the same, when the