The Eagle's Nest

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

A WASP IN THE SCHOOLROOM

One bright May morning, Madge, Betty, and John were a little more inattentive than usual over their lessons. Miss Thompson was very patient. She knew that warm spring days were full of distracting interests. The first wasp of the season managed to get into the schoolroom and buzz ostentatiously on the window-pane in the middle of a history lesson. There was a long pause of expectation on the part of the three children. Surely even a grown-up person could not be so utterly uninterested as to allow a queen-wasp to escape alive?

"What was the chief event of the reign of Henry the Eighth?" continued Miss Thompson, quite unmoved by the display of suppressed excitement around her. There was no answer, so she repeated the question a little louder.

"May I kill it, or would you rather do it yourself?" said Madge eagerly. The three children had now shut their books and given up all pretence of interest in anything except the wasp, which was trying harder than ever to buzz right through the pane of glass.

"Really nobody would suppose that you were twelve years old!" said Miss Thompson, in a vain effort to make her eldest pupil ashamed of herself. "Now then, open your history and see what was the most important event, if you can't remember."

"But it'll get away if you don't squash it!" shrieked John and Betty. They were twins, and perhaps for that reason always spoke together.

"Do leave the poor creature alone!" said Miss Thompson imploringly. "It cannot hurt you if you sit still and attend to your lessons."

"That's not what we are afraid of!" cried Madge; "it's the fruit! Don't you know a queen-wasp has millions of children before the summer is over, and we shan't have any fruit at all if you don't kill it!"

"No strawberries! No peaches! No nothing!" echoed the twins with growing excitement. "And it will be all your fault! But of course you don't care, as you never eat fruit. Papa won't like it though. He always kills—"

"My dears, please don't make such a silly fuss about nothing," interrupted Miss Thompson, rising with considerable dignity from her seat. The children watched her with the most intense interest; but when, instead of crushing the intruding wasp, she merely tried to brush it out of the open window with her handkerchief, they broke out into shouts of disapproval. If the poor lady had let loose some peculiarly savage wild beast on society she could not have been more severely condemned by public opinion. And the worst of it was, that the wasp would not go! She clung to the handkerchief, and when it was shaken at the open window suddenly transferred herself to the sleeve of her deliverer's dress.

Even Miss Thompson's calmness gave way under this trial. She started back with a slight scream. The children were at her side in a moment, beating and slapping at her arm, until they had inflicted almost as much injury as a sting.

"It's fallen on the floor!" shrieked Madge. "No! it's up again! It's back on the window! Where's the squasher?"

There was one well-established way of killing wasps in the schoolroom at Beechgrove....