The visitors drove inside the gate, and waited five minutes, when the donkey, having made the circuit of the premises, came galloping up, the whole tribe of young Mortimers after him.  They received Emily with loving cordiality, and accounted for the violent exercise they had been taking by the declaration that this donkey never would go at all, unless he heard a great noise and clatter at his heels.

“So that if Johnnie wanted to go far, as far as to London,” observed one of the panting family, “it would be awkward, wouldn’t it?”

“And he’s only a second-hand donkey, either,” exclaimed little Janie in deep disparagement of the beast; “father bought him of the blacksmith.”

“But isn’t it good fun to see him go so fast?” cried another.  “Would you like to see our donkey do it again?”

“And see him ’witch the world with noble assmanship,” said Valentine.

Whereupon a voice above said rather faintly.  “Hear, hear!” and Crayshaw appeared leaning out of a first-floor window, the pathetic shadow more than commonly evident in his eyes, in spite of a mischievous smile.  He had but lately recovered from a rheumatic fever, and was further held down by frequent attacks of asthma.  Yet the moment one of these went off, the elastic spirits of boyhood enabled him to fling it into the background of his thoughts, and having rested awhile, as he was then doing, he became, according to the account Gladys gave of him at that moment, “just like other boys, only ten times more so!”

Emily now alighted, and as they closed about her and hemmed her in, donkey and all, she felt inclined to move her elbows gently, as she had sometimes seen John do, in order to clear a little space about him.  “Why does not Cray come down, too?” she asked.

“I think he has had enough of the beast,” said Barbara, “for yesterday he was trying to make him jump; but the donkey and Cray could not agree about it.  He would not jump, and at last he pitched Cray over his head.”

“Odd,” said Valentine; “that seems a double contradiction to the proverb that ‘great wits jump.’” Valentine loved to move off the scene, leaving a joke with his company.  He now drove away, and Johnnie informed Emily that he had already been hard at work that morning.

“I’ve a right to enjoy mythelf after it,” he added, looking round in a patronising manner, “and I have.  I’ve not had a better lark, in fact, since Grand was a little boy.”

By these kind, though preposterous words, the assembly was stimulated to action.  The frightful clatter, drumming, and blowing of horns began again, and the donkey set off with all his might, the Mortimers after him.  When he returned, little Bertram was seated on his back.  “Johnnie and Cray have something very particular to do,” she was informed with gravity.

“For their holiday task?”

“Oh no, for that lovely electrifying machine of cousin Val’s.  Cray is always writing verses; he is going to be a poet.  Johnnie was saying last week that it was not at all hard to turn poetry into Latin, and Val said he should have the machine if he could translate some that Cray wrote the other day.  Do you think the Romans had any buttons and buttonholes?”