THE SALE OF ANTIQUITIES
their tea out of; though he did have his hair cut too, because he is the soul of truth and honor.
Oswald had a very good sort of birthday, with bows and arrows as well as other presents. I think these were meant to make up for the pistol that was taken away after the adventure of the fox-hunting. These gave us boys something to do between the birthday-keeping, which was on the Saturday, and the Wednesday when the Antiquities were to come.
We did not allow the girls to play with the bows and arrows, because they had the cakes that we were cut off from: there was little or no unpleasantness over this.
On the Tuesday we went down to look at the Roman place where the Antiquities were going to dig. We sat on the Roman wall and ate nuts. And as we sat there, we saw coming through the beet-field two laborers with picks and shovels, and a very young man with thin legs and a bicycle. It turned out afterwards to be a free wheel, the first we had ever seen.
They stopped at a mound inside the Roman wall, and the men took their coats off and spat on their hands.
We went down at once, of course. The thin-legged bicyclist explained his machine to us very fully and carefully when we asked him, and then we saw the men were cutting turfs and turning them over and rolling them up, and putting them in a heap. So we asked the gentleman with his thin legs what they were doing. He said:
205
