‘It’s very curious,’ Denny said, ‘but you don’t seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you’re doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don’t like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noel would make a poem about it.’
‘I am,’ Noel said; ‘it began about a crocodile but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute.’
He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:
'The crocodile is very wise, He lives in the Nile with little eyes, He eats the hippopotamus too, And if he could he would eat up you.
'The lovely woods and starry skies He looks upon with glad surprise! He sees the riches of the east, And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.
'So let all be good and beware Of saying shan't and won't and don't care; For doing wrong is easier far Than any of the right things I know about are.
And I couldn’t make it king of beasts because of it not rhyming with east, so I put the s off beasts on to king. It comes even in the end.’
We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noel gets really ill if you don’t like what he writes, and then he said, ‘If it’s trying that’s wanted, I don’t care how hard we TRY to be good, but we may as well do it some nice way. Let’s be Pilgrim’s Progress, like I wanted to at first.’
And we were all beginning to say we didn’t want to, when suddenly Dora said, ‘Oh, look here! I know. We’ll be the Canterbury Pilgrims. People used to go pilgrimages to make themselves good.’
‘With peas in their shoes,’ the Dentist said. ‘It’s in a piece of poetry--only the man boiled his peas--which is quite unfair.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said H. O., ‘and cocked hats.’
‘Not cocked--cockled’--it was Alice who said this. ‘And they had staffs and scrips, and they told each other tales. We might as well.’
Oswald and Dora had been reading about the Canterbury Pilgrims in a book called A Short History of the English People. It is not at all short really--three fat volumes--but it has jolly good pictures. It was written by a gentleman named Green. So Oswald said--
‘I’ll be the wife of Bath,’ Dora said. ‘What will you be, Dicky?’