The Palace in the Garden

"How new life reaps what the old life did sow. " / EDWIN ARNOLD.

I was the naughty one of the family. I dare say you -- whoever you are -- that are going to read this will have found this out already, and it was best to make it plain at the beginning. Tib and Gerald were really very good -- at least, they would have been if I had let them. But still, as I used often to say to them as a sort of a make-up for the troubles I got them into, it _would_ have been rather dull work had we all three been extra good. And even the great thing that I have to write about, _the_ thing that put it into my head to write at all, would never have come but for our being in a way naughty -- that is very queer, isn't it? To think that good and nice things should sometimes come out of being naughty! I have often puzzled about it. I think it must be that there are different kinds of naughtiness -- _perfectly_ different -- for nothing good could come out of real, wicked naughtiness -- telling lies, or being cruel to each other, or things like that; but the sort of naughtiness of just being mischievous, and of being so bubbling over with the niceness of being alive, that you _can't_ keep quiet, and remember about not knocking things over and tearing yourself, and the naughtiness of hating your lessons on a beautiful day, when it's really too tempting out-of-doors -- all these kinds of naughtiness and lots of others I could tell you, for I've thought so much about it -- all these kinds are different, surely? And one can fancy good and nice things coming out of them without getting one's ideas muddled.