“No, I don’t,” Francis answered. “I don’t believe Mermaids care a bit what you’ve got on. You see, they don’t wear anything but tails and hair and looking glasses themselves. If there’s any beautifulness to be done they jolly well do it themselves. But I don’t say you wouldn’t be better for washing your hands again, and you might as well try to get _some_ of the sand out of your hair. It looks like the wrong end of a broom as it is.” He himself went so far as to put on the blue necktie that Aunt Amy had given him, and polished his silver watch chain on the inside of his jacket. This helped to pass the time till the girls were ready. At last this happened though they had put on their best things, and they started. The yellowhammer went on about himself—he was never tired of the subject. “It’s just as if that bird was making fun of us,” Bernard said. “I daresay it is a wild-goose step we’re taking,” said Kathleen; “but the circus will be jolly, anyhow.” There is a piece of wasteland just beyond Beachfield on the least agreeable side of that village—the side where the flat-faced shops are and the yellow brick houses. At the nice end of Beachfield the shops have little fat bow windows with greenish glass that you can hardly see through. Here also are gaunt hoardings plastered with tattered, ugly-colored posters, asking you in red to wear Ramsden’s Really Boots or to Vote for Wilton Ashby in blue. Some of the corners of the posters are always loose and flap dismally in the wind. There is always a good deal of straw and torn paper and dust at this end of the village, and bits of dirty rag, and old boots and tins are found under the hedges where flowers ought to be. Also there are a great many nettles and barbed wires instead of pleasant-colored fences. Don’t you sometimes wonder who is to blame for all the uglification of places that might be so pretty, and wish you could have a word with them and ask them not to? Perhaps when these people were little nobody told them how wrong it is to throw orange peel about, and the bits of paper off chocolate, and the paper bag which once concealed your bun. And it is a dreadful fact that the children who throw these things about are little uglifiers, and they grow up to be perfect monsters of uglification, and build hideous yellow brick cottages, and put up hoardings, and sell Ramsden’s Really Boots (in red), and vote passionately for Wilton Ashby (in blue), and care nothing for the fields that used to be green and the hedges where once flowers used to grow. Some people like this, and see nothing to hate in such ugly waste places as the one, at the wrong end of the town, where the fair was being held on that never-to-be-forgotten day when Francis, Mavis, Bernard and Kathleen set out in their best clothes to rescue the Mermaid because Mermaids “die in captivity.”