_THE TOWN IN THE LIBRARY IN THE TOWN IN THE LIBRARY_
ROSAMUND and Fabian were left alone in the library. You may not believe
this; but I advise you to believe everything I tell you, because it is
true. Truth is stranger than story-books, and when you grow up you will
hear people say this till you grow quite sick of listening to them: you
will then want to write the strangest story that ever was—just to show
that _some_ stories can be stranger than truth.
Mother was obliged to leave the children alone, because Nurse was ill
with measles, which seems a babyish thing for a grown-up nurse to
have—but it is quite true. If I had wanted to make up anything I could
have said she was ill of a broken heart or a brain-fever, which always
happens in books. But I wish to speak the truth even if it sounds
silly. And it _was_ measles.
Mother could not stay with the children, because it was Christmas
Eve, and on that day a lot of poor old people came up to get their
Christmas presents, tea and snuff, and flannel petticoats, and warm
capes, and boxes of needles and cottons and things like that. Generally
the children helped to give out the presents, but this year Mother was
afraid they might be going to have measles themselves, and measles is
a nasty forward illness with no manners at all. You can catch it from
a person before they know they’ve got it, and if Rosamund and Fabian
had been going to have it they might have given it to all the old men
and women who came up to get their Christmas presents. And measles is a
present no old men or women want to have given them, even at Christmas
time, no matter how old they may be. They would not mind brain-fever or
a broken heart so much perhaps—because it is more interesting. But no
one can think it interesting to have measles, at any rate till you come
to the part where they give you jelly and boiled sole.