Apparently nobody did, so that it was useless to think of sending Archie back for it. Instead, I did a little wrist-work with the corkscrew.... "Now," said Archie, after lunch, "before you all go off with your butterfly nets, I'd better say that we shall be moving on at about half-past three. That is, unless one of you has discovered the slot of a Large Cabbage White just then, and is following up the trail very keenly." "I know what I'm going to do," I said, "if the flies will let me alone." "Tell me quickly before I guess," begged Myra. "I'm going to lie on my back and think about--who do you think do the hardest work in the world?" "Stevedores." "Then I shall think about stevedores." "Are you sure," asked Simpson, "that you wouldn't like me to show you that signalling now?" I closed my eyes. You know, I wonder sometimes what it is that makes a picnic so pleasant. Because all the important things, the eating and the sleeping, one can do anywhere. IV.--IN THE WET Myra gazed out of the window upon the driving rain and shook her head at the weather. "Ugh!" she said. "Ugly!" "Beast," I added, in order that there should be no doubt about what we thought. "Utter and deliberate beast." We had arranged for a particularly pleasant day. We were to have sailed across to the mouth of the--I always forget its name, and then up the river to the famous old castle of-of-no, it's gone again; but anyhow, there was to have been a bathe in the river, and lunch, and a little exploration in the dinghy, and a lesson in the Morse code from Simpson, and tea in the woods with a real fire, and in the cool of the evening a ripping run home before the wind. But now the only thing that seemed certain was the cool of the evening. "We'll light a fire and do something indoors," said Dahlia. "This is an extraordinary house," said Archie. "There isn't a single book in it, except a lot of Strand Magazines for 1907. That must have been a very wet year." "We can play games, dear." "True, darling. Let's do a charade." "The last time I played charades," I said, "I was Horatius, the front part of Elizabeth's favourite palfrey, the arrow which shot Rufus, Jonah, the two little Princes in the Tower, and Mrs Pankhurst." "Which was your favourite part?" asked Myra. "The front part of the palfrey. But I was very good as the two little Princes." "It's no good doing charades, if there's nobody to do them to." "Thomas is coming to-morrow," said Myra. "We could tell him all about it." "Clumps is a jolly good game," suggested Simpson. "The last time I was a clump," I said, "I was the first coin paid on account of the last pair of boots, sandals, or whatnot of the man who laid the first stone of the house where lived the prettiest aunt of the man who reared the goose which laid the egg from which came the goose which provided the last quill pen used by the third man Shakespeare met on the second Wednesday in June, 1595."