“I should get just like shock-headed Peter,” said Olly, shaking his head gravely at the idea.  Shock-headed Peter was a dirty little boy in one of Olly’s picture-books; but I am sure you must have heard about him already, and must have seen the picture of him with his bushy hair, and his terrible long nails like birds’ claws.  Olly was never tired of hearing about him, and about all the other children in that picture-book.

“What a funny little girl Bessie is, mother!” said Milly.  “Do they always say Naw and Yis in this country, instead of saying No and Yes, like we do?”

“Well, most of the people that live here do,” said Mrs. Norton.  “Their way of talking sounds odd and queer at first, Milly, but when you get used to it you will like it as I do, because it seems like a part of the mountains.”

All this time they had been climbing up a steep path behind the gardener’s house, and now Mr. Norton opened a door in a high wall, and let the children into a beautiful kitchen-garden made on the mountain side, so that when they looked down from the gate they could see the chimneys of Ravensnest just below them.  Inside there were all kinds of fruit and vegetables, but gooseberry bushes and the strawberries had nothing but green gooseberries and white strawberries to show, to Olly’s great disappointment.

“Why aren’t the strawberries red, mother?” he asked in a discontented voice, as if it must be somebody’s fault that they weren’t red.  “Ours at home were ripe.”

“Well, Olly, I suppose the strawberries know best.  All I can tell you is, that things always get ripe here later than at Willingham.  Their summer begins a little later than ours does, and so everything gets pushed on a little.  But there will be plenty by-and-by.  And suppose just now, instead of looking at the strawberries, you give just one look at the mountains.  Count how many you can see all round.”

“One, two, three, five,” counted Olly.  “What great big humps!  Should we be able to touch the sky if we got up to the top of that one, mother?” and he pointed to a great blue mountain where the clouds seemed to be resting on the top.

“Well, if you were up there just now, you would be all among the clouds, and it would seem like a white fog all round you.  So you would be touching the clouds at any rate.”

Olly opened his eyes very wide at the idea of touching the clouds.

“Why, mother, we can’t touch the clouds at home!”

“That comes of living in a country as flat as a pancake,” said Mr. Norton.  “Just you wait till we can buy a tame mountain, and carry it to Willingham with us.  Then we’ll put it down in the middle of the garden, and the clouds will come down to sit on the top of it just as they do here.  But now, who can scramble over that gate?”