On our return from the walk Mrs. White inspected our lunch-baskets, confiscating what she considered injurious to our digestions and teeth and allowing us to fortify ourselves against further blesséd play and blesséd work with the remains. I have often wondered what actually became of the cake and candy she daily took from us “for our own good,” and I shouldn’t be surprised if she scattered it along the sidewalk or threw it into passing carriages. It would have been a natural reaction from her incessant official pother about “neatness and thrift,” but at the time we all of course firmly believed that she put the loot away in a pantry and that the whole White family lived on it for weeks. Almost everything we learned at Mrs. White’s was sure to be incorrect to the point of imbecility. For I don’t know how long after leaving there I took it for granted that a thoughtful Creator had supplied dear Bossy with a “dewlap” in order that she could wipe dry each mouthful of wet grass before eating it. “When Bossy goes out to the fields in the morning for her breakfast, this long, soft fold you see here under her neck” (pointing to the picture) “swings from side to side brushing away the damp and chilly dew,” Mrs. White had told us, and I need scarcely dwell on the disappointment and sense of injury I experienced when I subsequently sought Bossy in her graminaceous lair and watched her dewlap quite otherwise engaged. But even so, Mrs. White is no more, and anyhow I was always a facile relenter. At times I have been even grateful for Mrs. White’s. There was for instance the mystery of Mary Blake and the mystery of the White Maria. I have often been grateful for them.