Page:The Wouldbegoods.djvu/116

 jellies, and her two sisters were hurrying about with great hams and pairs of chickens and rounds of cold beef and lettuces and pickled salmon and trays of crockery and glasses.

"It's for the angling competition." she said.

We said, "What's that?"

"Why," she said, slicing cucumber like beautiful machinery while she said it, "a lot of anglers come down some particular day and fish one particular bit of the river. And the one that catches most fish gets the prize. They're fishing the pen above Stoneham Lock. And they all come here to dinner. So I've got my hands full and a trifle over."

We said, "Couldn't we help?"

But she said, "Oh no, thank you. Indeed not, please. I really am so I don't know which way to turn. Do run along, like dears."

So we ran along like these timid but graceful animals.

Need I tell the intellectual reader that we went straight off to the pen above Stoneham Lock to see the anglers competing? Angling is the same thing as fishing.

I am not going to try and explain locks to you. If you've never seen a lock you could never understand even if I wrote it in words of one syllable and pages and pages long. And if you have, you'll understand without my telling you. It is harder than Euclid if you don't know beforehand. But you might get a grown-up person to explain it to you with books or wooden bricks.