WAS PENELOPE BOTH DEEPLY EXCITED and more than a little afraid to begin this rough-and-tumble excursion into Parts Unknown?
Do bears live in the woods?
(Note that in this case, the rhetorical question about bears is meant to mean: absolutely, positively yes. Bears do live in the woods, and Penelope was both excited and fearful, and about either fact there can be no doubt. “Is the pope Catholic?” is another popular version of this type of question, but new ones are invented all the time. Is a Swanburne girl plucky? Does an ostrich have long legs? And so on.)
Although in the end she had packed lightly, according to the children’s instructions, Penelope had insisted on tucking two books into the large pockets of her rugged twill safari skirt. One was her favorite book of melancholy German poetry in translation, which she always carried with her when she felt in need of reassurance. The other was a fictional tale of danger and exploration that she had found in Lord Fredrick’s library while doing research into wilderness survival techniques. It was about a man who had been shipwrecked on a remote Tahitian island and managed to survive by means of his determination, his skill at building shelters and canoes, and his fortunate knack for avoiding being eaten by cannibals.
Penelope found the tale unsettling, frankly, but as much as she would have preferred to bring Rainbow in Ribbons, she thought this shipwreck saga might be of practical use should she and the children get separated from the admiral and have to survive on their own for, say, eight-and-twenty years. This was the length of time the poor sailor in the book was stranded on the island, which, understandably, he came to call the Island of Despair.
But before we continue any further with the adventures of Miss Penelope Lumley and the three Incorrigible children as they venture into the forest in pursuit of a runaway ostrich, let us look away for a moment (for they will have to do quite a lot of hup, hup, hupping before they get far enough into the woods for things to become interesting) and consider some matters of linguistic significance, starting with three letters: namely, P, O, and E.
When the admiral first said POE, Miss Lumley thought he meant Poe, as in Edgar Allan Poe. This is because POE and Poe are homonyms, which means they are two different words that are pronounced the same way.
POE is also an acronym, which is a word made out of the first letters of other words. To the admiral it stood for Permanent Ostrich Enclosure, although POE could just as easily stand for something else: Pie Over Everything, for example, a tasty, if filling, notion. Or Ponder On Elks, which, as you already know, is nearly impossible to avoid doing once you have been told (and told, and told yet again, in the strictest possible terms) not to ponder on elks.
Some acronyms prove so catchy that they become words in their own right. Marine explorers know that “scuba” is an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Those of you who enjoy shooting laser beams at your friends for sport can bamboozle your opponents by crying out, “Here comes my Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation!” just before you fire.
If you now think that you would rather confront a herd of Profoundly Outraged Elephants in a Perilously Oscillating Elevator than hear another word about homonyms, acronyms, or any other kind of nyms—well, think again. There is power in words used accurately and well, and tragedy and missed train connections in words used carelessly. Consider how disappointed you would feel if, after booking an expensive spa vacation, you found yourself on holiday with the Society of Professional Accountants instead. (Note: A word that no one has heard of is called a whatsthatonym, since the listener is bound to say “What’s that?” in response. A word that no one cares about is a sowhatonym. Alas, there is presently no word in English that means a word that does not exist, but perhaps the clever among you can invent one.)
“Please, Lumawoo. No more lessons,” Cassiopeia whined. For Penelope, too, had been using the occasion of their long march into the woods to review some of the finer points of the English language.
“We may be marching into Parts Unknown in search of a missing ostrich, but that is no excuse to neglect your education.” Penelope sounded more stern than usual, for her new hiking boots were beginning to pinch, and the trail had been going uphill for some time now. “But if you insist, let us move on to a more cheerful topic. Synonyms!” The children groaned, but Penelope paid them no mind. “Synonyms are two different words that mean more or less the same thing.”
“Dull and boring,” remarked Beowulf, poking his brother.
“Very good,” Penelope replied, choosing not to get the joke. “Dull and boring are fine examples of synonyms.”
“Tedious and uninteresting,” Alexander offered, concealing a smirk.
“Don’t care and cinnamins,” Cassiopeia said firmly. “Can I have biscuit?” Penelope sighed and offered her one. The pack she carried on her back was heavy enough, but even so, she wished she had not been so quick to leave the globe and abacus back at the nursery. Giving lessons “on the hoof,” as it were, was proving to be a mighty challenge.
“Pish posh, governess. A day or so away from the schoolroom won’t do the cubs any harm.” The admiral paused to wipe his brow, for the sun was now high overhead. They were somewhat sheltered by the forest’s canopy of leaves, but the day grew warmer by the quarter hour. “And they’re studying all the wrong things, anyway. How to tell tomorrow’s weather from the color of the evening sky. How to start a fire with wet wood and no matches. How to catch your evening’s meal and cook it over a spit. How to suck the venom out of a snakebite before it stops your heart dead—aargh!” To the children’s delight, the admiral faked a gruesome death by snakebite, clutching his chest and staggering to the ground while his tongue waggled out the side of his mouth. After a moment, and to polite applause, he recovered. “Those are the things a person needs to know to survive, governess. Not thisonyms and thatonyms.”
Penelope did not bother to explain that the Incorrigibles were more than capable of catching their own meals and would probably prefer to eat them uncooked, rather than roasted on a spit. But the admiral did have a point about snakebites.
“Very well,” she conceded. “Synonyms can wait. But I shall read to the children this evening at bedtime, regardless; it is our custom. You need not listen if you find the tale dull. Or boring. Or tedious, or uninteresting,” she added, straight-faced. The children giggled at the way their clever governess had snuck the lesson in nevertheless.
“Stories at bedtime, eh?” The admiral checked his watch. “With any luck I’ll be back at the house long before then, smoking Ashton’s cigars, with Bertha safely locked up in the POE. ‘Finders keepers,’ he says. What nerve! The spoiled young lordship needs to be taught a lesson, if you ask me.” He pounded his cane into the mossy ground. “But never mind that. Ostriches are long of leg and short on brains. Bertha can’t have gone far. Cubs, fall in! Sniffing formation, hup! Now, any whiff of the bird?”
The children passed around Cassiopeia’s plume and sniffed deeply. At Alexander’s signal, they started tracking, moving in zigzags and ever-widening circles with their noses first to the ground, and then lifted high in the air. Soon they had disappeared into the surrounding woods. For five endless minutes the children were out of sight. They reappeared shortly, with muddy hands and knees, breathless and excited to be sure, but empty-handed.
“No bird to the north,” Alexander announced, checking the sextant.
“No bird that way, either,” Beowulf said, pointing southward.
“And no egg, nowhere. Nevahwoo!” Cassiopeia added.
“Blast,” said the admiral. “Well, it’s a big forest. We’ll just have to keep going.” With a grunt, he resumed the march.
Penelope limped along after him; her right heel was blistering inside those stiff new boots, and the bedroll strapped to her back dug painfully into her shoulders. She was desperate to sit down, remove her hot, itchy helmet for a few minutes, and fix herself a cup of tea. After a few painful strides, she caught up and tugged on the admiral’s sleeve. “We have been walking for three hours, at least. The children will need lunch soon, and a nap.”
“Naps!” He snorted contemptuously. “Nature is red in tooth and claw, governess. Tooth and claw! You don’t want to let it catch you napping.” He consulted his pocket watch once more. “Another hour and we’ll stop for grub. Hup, hup, hup!”
IT TURNED OUT THAT BY “stopping for grub,” the admiral meant pausing to distribute pieces of some sort of dried salted beef and a handful of nuts to each person, which they were then expected to eat on the march. “Can’t lose our momentum now,” he said cheerily, tearing off a bite. The children seemed to like the leathery strips, especially Beowulf, who never met an object upon which he would not happily gnaw, but Penelope felt as if she were trying to eat the sole of a shoe. She nibbled on the nuts instead and was grateful for a swallow of warm, metallic-tasting water from her canteen.
“Another hour and we’ll stop for grub. Hup, hup, hup!”
Midday turned to afternoon, and early afternoon to late. With blisters on her feet, gnats buzzing all around (real ones now, and hungry for blood), sweat trickling down her back, and an empty tummy that went from grumbling to growling to grumbling again, Penelope found it hard to believe that she had ever felt optimistic about anything. Surely it was the admiral’s problem if his ostrich was so ill-mannered that it ran away without so much as a by-your-leave? “Yet if we do not find her, Lord Fredrick might—and that will never do,” Penelope thought, wincing with every step.
“Boring. Tedious. Uninteresting. Don’t care,” the Incorrigibles chanted dully as they marched, deeper and deeper into the woods. Soon they became too tired to say even that much, and BTUD (Boring Tedious Uninteresting Dontcare) did not hold much promise as an acronym, even if the children had thought of making it into one. Gradually they fell out of formation; instead of marching in a crisp line with lifted knees and swinging arms, they bounded along, sniffing and leaping and tumbling over one another. This seemed to lift their spirits considerably.
In fact, the farther they marched, the more obvious it became that the children felt thoroughly at home here in the forest. Alexander’s stiff-backed schoolboy posture gradually altered into a light-footed loping stride. Every twenty paces or so, Beowulf would shinny up the trunk of a tree and leap from branch to branch, making quicker progress through the treetops than the rest of the party made on the ground. Soon Cassiopeia forgot herself completely and began to run on all fours. Penelope had to tug at the back of her dress to remind the girl to walk on two feet so as not to ruin her stockings.
The admiral noticed the change as well. The shadows that crept along the forest floor grew long and melted into the dusk. Finally, as they reached a small clearing, he ordered, “Halt! At ease,” and they stopped to make camp for the night before it was too dark to see. He set the children to gather kindling wood for the campfire. While they were busy at their task, he approached Penelope, a greedy, conspiratorial look in his eye.
“Governess, I have a business proposition to discuss with you.”
Penelope was trying her best to erect a shelter for herself and the children; at the moment she was puzzling over which side of the tarpaulin was the top, and making no progress whatsoever. She ached from head to toe; she wanted a hot bath and a bright fire to read by and was in no mood for the admiral’s bluster. “My business is giving lessons, Admiral. Is that what you mean? As you recall, I only know the sorts of things you consider to be useless: thisonyms and thatonyms.”
“You can keep your whatonyms and whatnots. My business is profit, and when I see an opportunity to make some, I act upon it.” He leaned forward on his cane. “Exotic creatures are my specialty, governess. I’ve traveled the globe in search of the rare, the fascinating, the one of a kind. Or, in this case, three of a kind.”
The tarp slipped from Penelope’s hands. “Exotic creatures? What on earth do you mean?”
His voice was low and excited. “I’ve plundered the pyramids in Egypt, swum with sharks in the coral reefs of Botany Bay, and scaled the slippery summit of Mount Crisco, but never in all my travels have I come across three specimens like these Incorrigible wolf children of yours. Think of the exhibitions we could give!”
Penelope turned so abruptly that her pith helmet slid forward over her face. She pushed it back and looked the admiral in the eye.
“Are you suggesting that you would put the children on display? Like animals in a zoo?”
“They’d be wasted in a zoo, governess. It’s their abilities that amaze. I’d put them in a special habitat, where their talent for tracking could be fully appreciated. A Permanent Incorrigible Enclosure.”
The thought of Alexander, Beowulf, and Cassiopeia being put in a PIE was more than Penelope could stomach. “As their governess, the only ability of theirs that concerns me is their ability to make accurate use of the apostrophe,” she retorted. “And may I remind you, Admiral, they are doing you a service by helping you find Bertha. Surely you would not repay them by baking them in a PIE?”
Of course, she meant to say “locking” rather than “baking,” but this is precisely what is so tricky about acronyms and homonyms. Penelope knew the admiral meant a fenced-in enclosure designed to house the Incorrigibles, but in her mind’s eye all she could see was a rolled-out pastry crust with the children’s three auburn-haired heads sticking out one side and their feet wriggling out the other, just like the four-and-twenty blackbirds in the famous nursery rhyme:
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,
Four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing;
Oh, wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king?
The admiral drew himself up to his full height and peered down at Penelope as if she were nothing more than a zoo specimen herself. “It takes a person of vision to appreciate a golden opportunity when it arrives. I thought you might be such a person, governess. It seems I was wrong.” Cunningly he added, “Anyway, it would be for the children’s own safety. When Ashton gets tired of them, what do you think he’ll do? He’s not the sentimental sort, from what I can tell. They’ll end up in an orphanage. Or worse. Now if they could earn their keep by doing a few simple, enjoyable demonstrations for an adoring and well-paying public, all while living in a snug, homey PIE of their own, you wouldn’t have to worry about Ashton’s whims.” His tone grew ominous. “Or his eyesight.”
“Are you trying to frighten me, Admiral?”
“Not at all, governess. Merely discussing business.”
But the discussion was over. He strode across the clearing to the woodpile where the children were stacking the kindling and asked, “What say you, pups? Any scent of Bertha?”
Penelope tried once more to fashion the tarpaulin into a tent. The admiral’s proposal was absurd—imagine, putting the children in a PIE!—but it raised another, deeper anxiety, one that had been growing within her all day as she watched her pupils gradually revert, bit by bit, to their animal-like habits: What was the risk that the three Incorrigible children would be overcome by the lure of their woodsy, wolfy origins and, like Bertha, run off altogether?
She watched as they carried the last of the kindling to the woodpile, bounding on all fours with sticks in their mouths and looking for all the world like a trio of joyful puppies playing a game of fetch.
What if they decided they much preferred the muffled sounds of the forest, the soft, springy moss beneath their feet, the scent of a tasty field mouse on the breeze—the howl of the wild, if you will—to the world of books and poetry and socially useful phrases that Penelope had so painstakingly and lovingly introduced them to?
What if they never wanted to go back to Ashton Place at all?
THE MORNING HAD BEEN BRIGHT, but now that nightfall was upon them, strange winds were kicking up. One did not have to be a sailor to tell that a storm was brewing. Spending a night or two outdoors in a securely pitched tent was a tolerable idea, but thunder? Lightning? Penelope was fully prepared to fend off a bear with a stick, carve a canoe out of a fallen tree trunk, and teach long division with acorns, but if there should be a violent storm during the night, she did not think she would be able to manage without hiding under the covers of her bedroll, and what would the children think of that?
The Incorrigibles seemed untroubled by the rapidly changing weather. The campfire was ablaze, a hearty dinner had been cooked and eaten (fashioned from the provisions they had packed and a few fat squab the children had wordlessly produced, although their proud faces and the tiny feathers stuck to their clothes said as much as needed to be said). Alexander had even filled a small, portable tin kettle with water from a nearby stream so Penelope could put it on to boil for tea.
Despite her worries, she had to admit it was rather pleasant to finally take off her boots and relax with a full tummy in the flickering light, listening to the pop and crackle of the fire. The admiral was in his tent, reviewing the maps of the forest the children had drawn for him so he might plot a course for the morning. And it was not raining yet; perhaps the storm would pass over them without shedding a drop.
Penelope felt a glimmer of her old optimism coming back. “Who would like a bedtime book?” she asked, and when the children responded with enthusiasm, she smiled. “Very well. Let us tidy up our campsite first, and then I shall read to you. Be quick about your chores, for I have chosen a particularly thrilling tale for the occasion, written by Mr. Daniel Defoe.”
After the dinner plates had been rinsed, the tea poured, and everything made ready for the morrow, Penelope settled onto a large, flat rock that was somewhat shaped like a stool and close enough to the fire to have light to read by. She waited until the Incorrigibles were gathered ’round attentively, took out her book, turned to the first page, and began: “The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates.”
“Pirates! I’ll cut them to ribbons, woof!” Cassiopeia slashed back and forth with an imaginary sword.
“Is that the whole book?” Beowulf asked dubiously. “Not much happens.”
Penelope squirmed; sitting on a rock was not nearly as comfortable as her cozy armchair in the nursery would be. “No, that is just the title. And look here: Underneath all that it says, ‘Written by himself.’ That is to say, we are meant to believe that Robinson Crusoe himself wrote the book.”
Alexander looked confused. “Crusoe? No Defoe?”
Penelope frowned and tried to explain. “The book is fiction; that is to say, a made-up story written by Mr. Defoe, but he wants us to imagine it as a true account, as if it were written down by Robinson Crusoe himself. Who was actually a character made up by Mr. Defoe.”
“Too complicated.” Beowulf rose and peered out into the darkness. “Listen!”
They all listened. There was a noise, not too far off. A slow crunch…crunch…crunch, like the approach of footsteps. As if someone were trying, and failing, to walk quietly on the twigs and leaves of the forest floor.
Cassiopeia jabbed at the shadows with her stick. “Nevermore, pirates!” Before Penelope could stop her, she bounded over to the admiral’s small tent and shouted within:
“Admiral, wake up wake up wake upahwoo! Pirates off the starboard bow, wow, woof!”
There was a loud snore from within the tent. At Cassiopeia’s cry, the snore turned to a sputter, the sputter to a crash and then a bellowed “Blast!” The tent shook on its pegs. After a moment the admiral batted his way through the flap.
“Who’s there, what?” he cried. “Are we under attack?”
Penelope kept her voice calm. “We heard something, in the woods. Footsteps, possibly.”
“Footsteps? It might be Bertha. Good news. I’ll go round her up.” He went back into the tent, still talking as he rummaged. “Hmm. I’ll need my Always Waterproof Fashion Ostrich Leash. And my Savory Pickled Ostrich Treats; those will help lure her, if she’s feeling skittish.”
Crunch…crunch…crunch.
The sound grew closer. The children sniffed. Alexander closed his eyes in concentration.
“Not a bird. Not a train,” he concluded after a moment.
“Not Mrs. Clarke, either,” Beowulf added.
“And not Bertha,” said Cassiopeia. All three of them nodded.
“Got my SPOTs!” The admiral emerged from the tent and began to walk into the woods, calling, “Here, Bertha old girl. Come to Fawsy. I have wittle ostrich tweats for you!”
Penelope blocked his way. “Admiral, wait. The children do not think it is Bertha.”
“Nonsense. Who else could it be?”
“Pirates!” Cassiopeia yelled, slashing away with her stick.
“Bears, perhaps—” Penelope began, but he cut her off.
“Bears don’t frighten me. And if it is Bertha, I have no intention of letting her get away again. I’ll go investigate. You and the children stay here.” At her look of dismay, he added, “You’ll be safe, as long as you don’t wander off. Keep near the fire. Wild animals are afraid of fire.” He narrowed his eyes at the children. “Most of ’em are, anyway.”
“Good luck, Captain Admiral, sir.” Alexander saluted, and Beowulf followed suit.
“Get those pirates!” Cassiopeia handed him the stick she had been using as a sword.
“Aren’t you a silly cub? Pirates don’t live in the woods.” He snapped the stick over his knee and dropped the pieces into the fire. Armed only with his AWFOL, and with his pockets crammed full of SPOTs, the admiral marched off.
AS ANYONE WHO HAS EVER taken a camping trip knows, nighttime out-of-doors is far from silent. The crickets and cicadas make a ceaseless, deafening buzz, coyotes cry mournfully in the distance, songbirds cheep and squawk at the first hint of dawn. And then there is the sound of one’s own frightened heart, beating much too loudly as one begins to think one has made a dreadful mistake to ever leave the comforts of home.
The four of them sat there, listening, waiting. After a few minutes, the admiral’s footsteps could no longer be heard.
“Ostriches,” said Alexander after some more time had passed, “are not nocturnal.”
“What an interesting bird-related fact; you must add it to the guidebook when we get home,” Penelope said with false cheer. Much as she distrusted the admiral, his absence made her feel panicky. Why was it taking him so long to come back? The children were restless, too, and their noses twitched in hopes of catching another whiff of whoever their unseen visitor had been.
Penelope summoned her last reserves of pluck and returned to her stony seat by the fire. “Let us continue the tale of Robinson Crusoe. I will skip the title this time, since you heard it already…. In fact, I will skip the whole beginning. Nothing terribly interesting is likely to happen before the shipwreck, don’t you agree?”
“Hespawoo,” Cassiopeia agreed, for the poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” which also centered on a shipwreck, was a particular favorite of the children’s.
“Shipwreck…shipwreck…let me see.” Penelope flipped the pages, looking for some passage that both she and the children might find sufficiently distracting to make them forget that the admiral had not yet returned. “Ah! This part seems rather exciting. Robinson Crusoe, having managed to survive on the Island of Despair for some years, one day finds a human footprint in the dirt, and fears there might be cannibals nearby.”
“What are cannibals?” Beowulf asked.
“Cannibals are people who hunt other people, in order to eat them,” she replied. “Now, about this footprint…”
All three children made faces of disgust.
“Pardon me, Lumawoo: If Defoe is real, and Crusoe is pretend, are cannibals real or pretend?” There was a tremor in Alexander’s voice as he asked.
Penelope realized her error, but it was too late. “Cannibals are real,” she replied cautiously, “but there are no cannibals in England. Cannibals live in faraway places.”
“So do ostriches,” Beowulf observed gravely. “But one is here, anyway.”
“You do have a point, Beowulf.” Now uneasy, Penelope snapped the book shut and slipped it back into her pocket. “Perhaps we ought to read something else. I know. Would any of you like to share your poem written in the style of POE? By which I mean, Poe?”
Alexander began at once.
“Once upon a forest creepy, I was feeling sore and sleepy,
Walking, walking, walking, walking. Still we had so far to go.”
Then Beowulf chimed in.
“I took out my pen for drawing. Suddenly there came a clawing
As if someone started gnawing, gnawing at my pinkie toe.
‘’Tis a cannibal,’ I muttered, ‘sawing at my pinkie toe.’”
With a swashbuckling gesture, Cassiopeia boldly finished:
“Take that, Edgar Allan Poe! Woof!”
“That—that was very good, children,” Penelope said weakly. How she wished she had brought Rainbow in Ribbons instead of Poe and Defoe! All of this doom and gloom was just making things worse.
Cassiopeia held up a hand. “Listen.”
Crunch…crunch…crunch…
“Stay calm, everyone. If it is a wild animal, it will not bother us if we stay near the fire.” Penelope did not actually know if this were true, but the admiral had said it was—although it was also true that Miss Charlotte Mortimer kept a lazy calico cat named Shantaloo who would lie so close to the fire her tail would get singed and give off a nasty smell of burning fur—
“Are cannibals afraid of fire?” Beowulf asked.
“I do not know. I am not well acquainted with the habits of cannibals; perhaps there is some reference in the Robinson Crusoe book….” Frantically she thumbed through the pages. “Dear me, an index would have come in useful here…cannibals, cannibals…I see there are quite a few mentions, but nothing particularly about fire….”
As she said the word “fire,” there was an earsplitting crack. Her first panicked thought was that Lord Fredrick was out hunting in the middle of the night with his rifle and had somehow found them. But another booming crack followed, and then a bright streak of lighting. The rain came down in sheets.
The campfire sputtered; then it was out. The extinguishing of the light made Penelope cry out in alarm. Within moments she and the children were drenched.
Alexander wiped the water from his eyes. He sniffed, and growled, and uttered a few words in the low, guttural language that he and his siblings sometimes used among themselves. “Lumawoo,” he said after the children had done conferring. “Time to go to the cave.”
“In this weather?” she cried, although even she realized how silly a remark it was, since they were already out-of-doors.
“Is not far,” Beowulf added reassuringly.
Penelope weighed the options: They could stay here, sodden and cold, and wait for the admiral to return. Or they could wander off in search of a cave, in the dark of night, in a wild, soaking storm.
Lightning flashed again, revealing the soggy pile of ash that was all that remained of the campfire. The tarpaulin she had worked so hard to put up had collapsed into a puddled heap with the first strong gust. Behind every tree Penelope imagined she saw the eyes of bloodthirsty cannibals, glinting hungrily in the dark.
“The cave it is, then,” she said, trying to sound as if she were still in charge. “But we must all three hold hands and not let go. I do not want us to get separated in this dark wood.” Penelope had taken any number of excursions with the children in which she had warned them not wander off, but this time she knew that she was the one most likely to get lost.
The children seemed to understand. Beowulf took her by one hand, and Cassiopeia took the other.
Alexander paused for a moment and carefully put away his sextant; it was of no use without a star to navigate by, and the sky was so thick with storm clouds that not even the light of the full moon could penetrate. But the children knew the way.
“To the cave,” Alexander said, pointing—at least Penelope thought he pointed; she could scarcely see two feet in front of her. Feeling as helpless and lost as if she had just been named It in a game of pin the tail on the elk, had a kerchief tied across her eyes, and been spun ’round and ’round so she could not tell right from left, Penelope allowed the Incorrigible children to lead her blindly into the dark.