In the midst of his holiday mood, he was disturbed by a voice calling him from overhead, and, looking up, he perceived Rebecca herself, earnestly gesticulating at the summit of the cliff. She shouted, she beckoned, incessantly, and seemed in such a fever of impatience that her father concluded that some disaster must have happened. "Hi, hi, Beck!" resounded his mighty voice, in answer, from the face of the cliff, as he began to scramble up the track by which he had descended. "What, is the house on fire, girl, or do the spies want to get hold of me?" he asked, with prodigious tranquillity; "or," and at the thought he quickened his scramble into a kind of kangaroo leap, "or has any harm come to some of the brats?" "The ladies are come! the ladies! and nobody at home but I and the dame," cried Rebecca; and her news seemed to be received with nearly as much vexation by her father as it was related with agony by herself. "They will dodge the brats, and put them out," he growled in his deepest tone: "after all the pains I meant to take to-day, the little things will be out in their Bibles, though they can say it all with me. The Faas and Draper will not be there, however; only the soberer sort of children." He was mistaken. The gipsy pupils were present with the rest, and formed a part of the class which Matilda had collected around her, and whom she was now engaged in examining. "Think of your running away yourself!" muttered Pim to his daughter. "Why could not you have sent the dame? There would have been no harm in her knowing where I was." "She would hardly have hobbled there and back before dinner," replied Rebecca. "We have been very quick, and the ladies can't have got far." They had got far enough to see that though the children had (in their own phrase) "got into the Bible," they had not (to use their master's) "got through it" with the understanding, whether or not they had with the tongue. The children Matilda was conversing with were all between ten and fifteen years of age, and therefore capable of giving intelligent answers about the patriarchal tale they had been reading, if about any part of the Bible whatever. "What did they do next," she asked, "after determining where they should settle?" "They pitched their tents before it grew dark." "Do you know how a tent is pitched?" "Yes, my lady; it is daubed all over with tar." Uriah Faa, well-informed on this matter, set the mistake right. "When they saluted each other, what did they do? What is it to salute?" "They scolded each other right well." "If they had wished to scold one another, there would hardly have been such handsome presents given;--so many sheep and oxen, and asses and camels. What is a camel?" "A sow." "But they _had_ been angry with one another," observed a child. "Yes; but they were now going to be friends, though they thought each other in fault. Should we be sorry or angry when others are in fault?" "Angry." "Why?"