“There be the lads!” shouted Timothy Saunders, as if I had been a hundred yards away, and deaf at that; but the noise meant joy, so it was welcome.  “My, but they’re fagged and tattered well to boot!” And so they were; but they struggled along, hand in hand, waving cheerfully when they caught sight of me, and finally crept through the pasture bars by which I was waiting, and enveloped me with faint, weary hugs.  Then I noticed that they wore no hats, their fresh suits were grimy with a gray dust like cement, the knees of their stockings and underwear were worn completely through to red, scratched skin, and the tips entirely scraped from their shoes.

I gathered them into the gig, and sought the explanation as we drove homeward, Timothy hurried by the vision of tearful Martha, whom he had seen with the tail of his eye dodge into the kitchen, her apron over her head, as he turned out the gate.

“We’ve been playing we was moles,” said Ian, in answer to the first question as to where they had been.  “Yesterday we tried to do it wif our own noses, but we couldn’t, ’cause it hurt, and we wanted to go ever so far.”

“So we went down to where those big round stone pipes are in the long hole,” said Richard, picking up the story as Ian paused. (Workmen had been laying large cement sewer pipes from the foot of the Bluffs, a third of a mile toward the marshes, but were not working that day, owing to lack of material.) “They made nice mole holes, so I crawled right in, and for a little it was bully fun.”

“Oh Richard, Richard, what made you?” I cried, holding him so tight that he squirmed away.  “Suppose the other end had been closed, and you had smothered in there, and mother had never found you?” for the ghastly possibility made my knees quake.

“Oh no, mother,” he pleaded, taking my face between his grimy hands and looking straight in my eyes, “it wasn’t a dark hole.  I could see it light out ’way at the other end, and it didn’t look so vely far as it was to crawl it.  And after a little I’d have liked to back out, only—­only, well, you see, I couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I asked, and, as he did not answer, I again saw a vision of two little forms wedged in the pipes.

“That why was ’cause I was in behind, and I wouldn’t back, and so Dick couldn’t,” said Ian.  “You see, Barbara, I really, truly had to be a mole and get very far away, not to stay, only just for fun, you know,” he added, as he saw signs of tears in his brother’s eyes, and began to feel the smarting in his own bruised knees.

One blessed thing about Ian, even though he is sometimes passionate and stubborn, and will probably have lots of trouble with himself by and by, there isn’t a drop of sneaky cur blood in him, which is the only trait that need make a mother tremble.

What should I do, punish, or act as I longed to, coddle the boys and comfort the poor knees?  True, I had not forbidden them to crawl through the sewer pipes, because the idea of their doing it had never occurred to me, so they could not be said to have exactly disobeyed; but, on the other hand, there was an unwritten law that they must not go off the place without my permission, and the torn stockings furnished a hint.