collection."

We dined before we started, I with the rest, and Isaac in our kitchen;
but I had no great appetite--I was too much excited--and I willingly
accepted some large sandwiches made with thick slices of home-made bread
and liberal layers of home-made potted meat, "in case I should feel
hungry" before I got there.

It pains me to think how distressed my mother was because I insisted on
carrying the sandwiches in a red and orange spotted handkerchief, which
I had purchased with my own pocket-money, and to which I was deeply
attached, partly from the bombastic nature of the pattern, and partly
because it was big enough for any grown-up man. "It made me look like a
tramping sailor," she said. I did not tell her that this was precisely
the effect at which I aimed, though it was the case; but I coaxed her
into permitting it, and I abstained from passing a certain knowing
little ash stick through the knot, and hoisting the bundle over my left
shoulder, till I was well out of the grounds.

My efforts to spare her feelings on this point, however, proved vain.
She ran to the landing-window to watch me out of sight, and had a full
view of my figure as I swaggered with a business-like gait by Isaac's
side up the first long hill, having set my hat on the back of my head
with an affectation of profuse heat, my right hand in the bee-master's
coat-pocket for support, and my left holding the stick and bundle at an
angle as showy and sailor-like as I could assume.

"And they'll just meet the Ebenezer folk coming out of chapel, ma'am!"
said our housemaid over my mother's shoulder, by way of consolation.