_Charles_: Oh yes, granny, do! and I know where the best blackberries are: I saw ’em to-day. _Grandmother_: And where’s that, Charles? _Charles_: Why, in the little lane that goes up past Collins’s cottage. _Grandmother_ (_laying down her knitting_): Charles! whatever you do, don’t you dare to pick one single blackberry in that lane. Don’t you _know_--but there, how should you--what was I thinking of? Well, anyway, you mind what I say---- _Charles and Lucy_: But why, granny? Why shouldn’t we pick ’em there? _Grandmother_: Hush! hush! Very well then, I’ll tell you all about it, only you mustn’t interrupt. Now let me see. When I was quite a little girl that lane had a bad name, though it seems people don’t remember about it now. And one day--dear me, just as it might be to-night--I told my poor mother when I came home to my supper--a summer evening it was--I told her where I’d been for my walk, and how I’d come back down that lane, and I asked her how it was that there were currant and gooseberry bushes growing in a little patch at the top of the lane. And oh, dear me, such a taking as she was in! She shook me and she slapped me, and says she, “You naughty, naughty child, haven’t I forbid you twenty times over to set foot in that lane? and here you go dawdling down it at night-time,” and so forth, and when she’d finished I was almost too much taken aback to say anything: but I did make her believe that was the first I’d ever heard of it; and that was no more than the truth. And then, to be sure, she was sorry she’d been so short with me, and to make up she told me the whole story after my supper. And since then I’ve often heard the same from the old people in the place, and had my own reasons besides for thinking there was something in it.