The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog
in Nicholas' basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he
felt entitled to know something about it. The sin of taking a frog from
the garden and putting it into a bowl of wholesome bread-and-milk was
enlarged on at great length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the
whole affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, was that
the older, wiser, and better people had been proved to be profoundly in
error in matters about which they had expressed the utmost assurance.
"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there
_was_ a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence of a
skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable ground.
So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting younger
brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he was to
stay at home. His cousins' aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted stretch
of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, had hastily invented
the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the delights
that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the breakfast-
table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from grace,
to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender would
be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they were
suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring town, a circus of
unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their
depravity, they would have been taken that very day.
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