“You are quite right, little girl. If you have any food, produce it. It
will be a generous act, and may stop any unpleasantness. My soldiers
_are_ very fierce. Besides,” he added in a lower tone, speaking behind
his hand, “you need only feed the soldiers in the usual way.”
When the children heard this their minds were made up.
“If you do not mind waiting a minute,” said Fabian, politely, “I will
bring down any little things I can find.”
Then he took his tongs, and Rosamund took the poker, and they opened
the drawer where the raisins and figs and dried fruits were—for
everything in the library in the town was just the same as in the
library at home—and they carried them out into the big square where
the Captain had drawn up his blue regiment. And here the soldiers were
fed. I suppose you know how tin soldiers are fed? But children learn
so little at school nowadays that I daresay you don’t, so I will tell
you. You just put a bit of the fig or raisin, or whatever it is, on
the soldier’s tin bayonet—or his sword, if he is a cavalry man—and you
let it stay on till you are tired of playing at giving the soldiers
rations, and then of course _you eat it for him_. This was the way in
which Fabian and Rosamund fed the starving blue soldiers. But when they
had done so, the soldiers were as hungry as ever. Which only shows that
soldiers are an ungrateful lot, and it is idle to try and make their
lives better and brighter.
So then the Blue Captain, who had not had anything, even on the point
of his sword, said—
“More—more, my gallant men are fainting for lack of food.”
So there was nothing for it but to bring out the candied fruits, and
to feed the soldiers with them. So Fabian and Rosamund stuck bits of
candied apricot and fig and pear and cherry and beetroot on the tops of
the soldiers’ bayonets, and when every soldier had a piece they put a
fat candied cherry on the officer’s sword. Then the children knew the
soldiers would be quiet for a few minutes, and they ran back into their
own house and into the library to talk to each other about what they
had better do, for they both felt that the blue soldiers were a very
hard-hearted set of men.
“They might shut us up in the dungeons,” said Rosamund, “and then
Mother might lock us in, when she shut up the lid of the bureau, and we
should starve to death.”
For they could not be sure exactly what size they were, or which
library their Mother would come back to when she had given away all the
flannel petticoats and things.
The dungeons were the pigeon-holes of the bureau, and the doors of them
were the little “Beauties of Literature”—very heavy doors they were too.
You see the curious thing was that the children had built a town and
got into it, and in it they had found their own house with the very
town they had built—or one exactly like it—still on the library floor.
“I think it’s all nonsense,” said Rosamund. But when they looked out
of the window there was the house with Windsor Castle and the head of
Rebecca just opposite.
“If we could only find Mother,” she said; but they knew without looking
that Mother was not in the house that they were in then.
“I wish we had that mouse that looked like clockwork—and the donkey,
and the other box of soldiers—perhaps they are red ones, and they would
fight the blue and lick them—because red-coats are English and they
always win,” said Fabian.