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BILL THE MINDER

Old Crispin, the mushroom gatherer, and his good wife Chloe had ten children, and nine of them were bad-tempered. There was Chad, the youngest and most bad-tempered of the lot, Hannibal and Quentin the twins, Randall with the red head, Noah, Ratchett the short-sighted, Nero the worrit, weeping Biddulph and Knut. The only good-tempered child was a little girl named Boadicea.

It is well known that a boy usually takes after his father, and a girl after her mother, and these children were no exception to the rule, for the boys[Pg 3] all resembled old Crispin, whose temper had been rather tried, poor man, by the early hours at which he had to rise, in order to gather the mushrooms when they were quite new and young. On the other hand, Boadicea could only have inherited her good-temper from Chloe, who without doubt was the most good-tempered dame alive.

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Now it is quite true that any one who cares to rise early enough in the morning may gather mushrooms, and plenty of them, too, but those who do so only now and again, and merely for amusement, little know the hard life of the professional gatherer, or the skill and 

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