“Look here, dears, you may play with your bricks, or make pictures
with your pretty blocks that kind Uncle Thomas gave you, but you must
not touch the two top-drawers of the bureau. Now don’t forget. And if
you’re good you shall have tea with me, and perhaps there will be cake.
Now you _will_ be good, won’t you?”
Fabian and Rosamund promised faithfully that they would be _very_ good
and that they would not touch the two top-drawers, and Mother went away
to see about the flannel petticoats and the tea and snuff and tobacco
and things. When the children were left alone, Fabian said—
“I am going to be very good, I shall be much more good than Mother
expects me to.”
“We _won’t_ look in the drawers,” said Rosamund, stroking the shiny top
of the bureau.
“We won’t even _think_ about the insides of the drawers,” said Fabian.
He stroked the bureau too and his fingers left four long streaks on it,
because he had been eating toffee.
“I suppose,” he said presently, “we may open the two _bottom_ drawers?
Mother couldn’t have made a mistake—could she?”
So they opened the two bottom drawers just to be sure that Mother
hadn’t made a mistake, and to see whether there was anything in the
bottom drawers that they ought not to look at.
But the bottom drawer of all had only old magazines in it. And the next
to the bottom drawer had a lot of papers in it. The children knew at
once by the look of the papers that they belonged to Father’s great
work about the Domestic Life of the Ancient Druids, and they knew it
was not right—or even interesting—to try to read other people’s papers.
So they shut the drawers and looked at each other, and Fabian said, “I
think it would be right to play with the bricks and the pretty blocks
that Uncle Thomas gave us.”
But Rosamund was younger than Fabian, and she said, “I am tired of the
blocks, and I am tired of Uncle Thomas. I would rather look in the
drawers.”
“So would I,” said Fabian. And they stood looking at the bureau.
Perhaps you don’t know what a bureau is—children learn very little at
school nowadays—so I will tell you that a bureau is a kind of chest
of drawers. Sometimes it has a bookcase on the top of it, and instead
of the two little top corner drawers like the chests of drawers in a
bedroom it has a sloping lid, and when it is quite open you pull out
two little boards underneath—and then it makes a sort of shelf for
people to write letters on. The shelf lies quite flat, and lets you see
little drawers inside with mother of pearl handles—and a row of pigeon
holes—(which are not holes pigeons live in, but places for keeping the
letters carrier-pigeons could carry round their necks if they liked).
And there is very often a tiny cupboard in the middle of the bureau,
with a pattern on the door in different coloured woods. So now you know.