It was here, however, and in the field, said Lord Sigismund returning, containing the donkeys. For the privilege of sharing with these animals their bare and shelterless field, exposed as it was to all the social amenities of the district, including the piano-organ, the shops opposite, the smell of leather in the making, and the company as long as the light lasted of innumerable troops of children, the owner would make us a charge of half a crown per caravan for the night, but this only on condition that we did not turn out, as he appeared to have had the greatest suspicions we would turn out, to be a circus. With a flatness of which I would not have [Illustration: _“But surely not here,” murmured Frau von Eckthum_] thought her capable Frau von Eckthum refused to spend a night in the donkey field; and Mrs. Menzies-Legh, who was absorbed in snap-shotting the ever-swelling crowd of children and loafers who were surrounding us, suddenly stamped her foot and said she would not either. “The horses can’t go another yard,” remonstrated Menzies-Legh. “I won’t sleep with the donkeys,” said his wife, taking another snap. Her sister said nothing, but held her handkerchief as before. Then Jellaby, descrying a hedge with willows beyond it at the far-away end of the field, and no doubt conscious of a parliamentary practice in persuasion, said he would get permission to go in there for the night, and disappeared. Lord Sigismund expressed doubts as to his success, for the man, he said, was apparently own brother to the female at the farm, or at any rate of the closest spiritual affinity; but Jellaby did come back after a while, during which the piano-organ’s waltzes had gone on accentuating the blank dreariness of the spot, and said it was all right. Later on I discovered that what he called all right was paying exactly twice as much per caravan for the superior exclusiveness of the willow field as what was demanded for the donkey field. Well, he did not have to pay, being Menzies-Legh’s guest, so no doubt he did think it all right; but I call it monstrous that I should be asked to pay that which would have secured me a perfectly dry bedroom with no grass in it in a first-rate Berlin hotel for the use for a few hours of a gnat-haunted, nettle-infested, low-lying, swampy meadow.