William in Trouble Read Free Page B

the whole, satisfied with his afternoon. He’d given them a better show than that ole man with the white beard, anyway. He
didn’t seem to know how to make things interesting. Fancy digging up nothing but bits of ole pot and dirty ole halfpennies. Anyone’d get tired of watching that all day.
    William carried the basket containing his ‘finds’ up to his bedroom, and there amused himself by taking them out one by one and holding forth to an imaginary audience. He thought of
a lot more things to say. He wished he could do it all over again. He could do it heaps better. He heard his father come in with a visitor and stopped a dramatic account of the meeting of Romus and
Remus and the wolf in the wood to go and lean over the banisters to see who it was. Crumbs! it was the little old man with the white beard.
    He returned very slowly to his bedroom. He did not continue the account of the meeting of Romus and Remus with the wolf. Instead, he tried to express to an imaginary accuser the fact that
p’raps he might have shot the catapult by mistake. Yes, he remembered distinctly holding it in his hand, and he admitted that it might have gone off by mistake when he
wasn’t looking. They did sometimes. He was very sorry if he hit anyone, very sorry indeed. He remembered when it went off by mistake hoping that it hadn’t hit anyone, because he always
tried to be very careful with it and hold it so that if it went off by mistake it wouldn’t hit anyone.
    William practised in his looking-glass for a few minutes the sort of face that went with the foregoing sentiments, and having achieved a look of blank imbecility which he fondly imagined to
express concern and contrition, he went downstairs, his features still carefully composed.
    Determining to get the worst over at once, he entered the drawing-room where his father sat conversing with the visitor. William sat down by the door and stared at the visitor. On his entrance
into the room his features had, unknown to himself, taken on an expression of pugnacious fury, and the ferocious glare which he turned on the innocent old man would have reduced any of
William’s own followers to instant subjection. The old man, however, met it blandly enough.
    ‘Is that the little boy?’ he asked. ‘Come nearer, my little fellow,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I can hardly see you over there. I’m so near-sighted that I
can hardly see across a room.’
    William’s expression softened. He liked old men who were so near-sighted that they could hardly see across a room. It meant that they were so near-sighted that they could hardly see across
a field at the end of which a small boy might stand with a catapult which had a habit of going off by mistake.
    William shook hands with the benign old man, who then immediately went on with his conversation with William’s father.
    ‘Yes, we’ve got some most interesting exhibits – most interesting. Your valley has proved indeed a most fruitful field.’
    ‘When do you finish?’ asked Mr Brown.
    ‘On Saturday. The discoveries cannot, of course, be moved till next week. I shall send off the bulk of them on Friday, but the half-dozen or so more valuable ones I shall take up myself on
Saturday. The vicar has asked me to be present at the Village Social on Saturday evening and give the people a little talk with an exhibition of the chief discoveries before I take them away. It
will, of course, be highly educative for them. A few came to watch the excavations, but on the whole I was disappointed – disappointed. A good many boys came on Wednesday afternoon. It would
have been an experience – a cultural experience – that they would have remembered all their lives – but they soon tired of it and went over to another part of the valley to join
in some childish game, I suppose. The modern child lacks perseverance. I fear that it was one of those children who projected some missile across the field the evening before, which precipitated