E. Nesbit

“ You will find it hard to believe that any one could be fiend-like, yet so it was. Madeline had somehow contrived to obtain accession to the harness-room shelf, and she had emptied that bait tin into my bed. If it had been some people, girls for instance, they would have screamed and gone raving mad upon the spot. This is a disgusting part of my story, and I hasten to say no more, only pausing to observe that Clifford slept in blankets and there was an imperial row in the morning when the bath was discovered to be full of bait and Clifford’s sheets. ”

“ Olive was the last to stand up for her. She is as patient as a tortoise generally, but even she gave out after the great Traitor’s Act that sealed the doom of the unamiable Madeline.
You know, of course, that however happy your home may be, and however fond you are of your kind parents, there are some things that you keep to yourself. Our great secret was the roof. No one knew anything about it but us. Clifford's bed was an old-fashioned four-poster, What need to own that he was man enough to have climbed on to the top? There was a trap-door there. ”

“ She only said, “You can keep your nasty old wet worms. I want to go fishing without them.”
The girls would have bent before her silliness like stubble in the blast and started fishing again, but Clifford was firm.
“No,” he said, “you must draw the line somewhere. And perhaps this'll be a lesson to her.” So he put the bait tin and tackle on a high shelf in the harness-room, in case the girls should be silly about it, and went off to see a keeper he knows who has a young fox in a hutch. It is quite tame and I like it. ”

“ One day when Mother and Father were going to a dinner party we decided to have a Brigands’ supper on our island. All was got ready in days and days of secret preparingness. We did not tell the hated Madeline till the last moment—but then we did. It was needful, because she slept in the girls’ room, and she peeped when they told her not to, and thus saw them put their nightgowns on over their clothes. So then she wouldn't go to sleep, and wanted to know why, and sniffed—and the whole plot had to be laid bare.
“I want to come too,” is what the girls say she said. ”

“ Because now it came to having done the Deed it looked very different, and we went on in an awful silence.
Quite soon, and much sooner than we had meant, Clifford turned our steed’s head and we went back, to find Madeline and explain that it was only a joke, for her own good.
“Do drive fast,” Olive said. “I do wish we hadn’t! Suppose she’s gone mad with terror!” ”

“ Our house is big and red, with a garden that has a wall round it. It was built when James was King, and that is why it has a flat slab over the front door. I know this sounds silly, but I heard an architect say it, so it must be true.
We did everything we could think of to make things jolly for Madeline. The girls got sunflowers and nasturtiums to put in the room she was to sleep in, and Martin and I picked three of the plums off the greengage-tree that is our own for her. They were not ripe, but that was Madeline’s fault, if anybody’s, for coming before they had time to get soft. ”

“ We had the picnic; we got the tea-basket and cakes and plums and took them in the donkey-cart to the woodiest woods we knew.
Here we had tea—it would have been jolly but for the Deed we had come to that dark wood to do. Olive couldn’t eat anything hardly, but we had to have tea before doing the dark Deed, because we did not want to starve the repelling Madeline as well or ... The author does not seem able to help getting on faster than he wants. I want the Deed to come upon you with a great surprise like it did on the unpopulous Madeline. ”

“ But Madeline had never had a relation at a Naval engagement. We had to hoist her on to the top of the Tallboys— (a Tallboys is like two chests of drawers on top of each other in case you don’t know) —and then shove her up to the top of the bedstead by main force. And the same with getting her through the trap-door. She was clumsy, but perhaps she was born like that, and we made allowances like Mother had said. ”

“ After some jaw it expired, as newspapers say, that she wanted us to take the little sneak fishing.
“Well,” said the present writer, “if we've got to be noble and unselfish, for goodness’ sake let’s be it, and get it over,”
So we went fishing. Our punt is kept tied up to the two old willows at the bottom of the baker’s garden. ”