All these were found in the Wonderful Garden except the potato, and none of the children knew what a potato looks like when it is growing, and they did not like to ask any one, for fear they in turn should be asked what they wanted it for.
‘Never mind,’ said Charles, ‘we can save one from dinner. I don’t suppose it will matter its being cooked.’
That the potatoes that day should happen to be mashed, seemed to all a mishap yet not a calamity. A quantity, deemed sufficient to influence Mr. Murdstone through his waxen image, was secreted in the envelope of a letter from Aunt Emmeline, and not more than an eighth of the potato escaped into Charles’s pocket through the square hole where the Italian stamp had been cut out for his collection.
‘We’ll arrange the things we want him to be round the box,’ said Caroline, ‘and the things we want him not to be we’ll burn and call it incense.’
Charles owned that he had been wondering what sort of incense you could make out of mashed potato.
Jasmine, with its white stars, bright Indian pinks, gay tufts of sage, and the oval-ringed leaves of the hazel, arranged round the box, made a charming tangle. ‘The silk wasn’t wanted, really,’ said Charles. ‘The hygienic boots would never have shown through the flowers.’ But the girls agreed that it was nice to know it was there.
The mashed potato and the rather faded pimpernel were carefully concealed under the more attractive offerings.
‘It looks fine,’ Charles said, and what he said they all thought.
[Illustration: Nothing much happened except smoke.]
It is very hard to make small pieces of green things burn in a cocoa-tin lid in the open air by means of a box of matches, and the fragments of a potato-dampened envelope from an aunt in Italy. Nothing much happened except smoke, and the head of a match burnt Charles’s finger.
‘There’s no more paper,’ said he, ‘except the bit we’ve written his name on.’
‘There’s the match-box,’ said Caroline; ‘let’s make a little bonfire with twigs and then put the incense things on when it’s burnt up.’ This they did; and the starry gold of St. John’s wort, the gay brightness of Indian pinks, and the feathery greenness of the tamarisks twisted and writhed amid flames and smoke.