He knew that he was not going to stay at the English clergyman's house where he was taken at first. He did not want to stay.
The English clergyman was poor and she had five children nearly all the same age and they wore shabby clothes and were always quarreling and snatching toys from each other. Toby hated their untidy house and was so disagreeable to them that after the first day or two nobody would play with him. By the second day they had given him a nickname which made him furious.
It was Bailey who thought of it first. Bailey was a little girl with impudent blue eyes and a turned-up nose, and Toby hated her. He was playing by himself under a tree, just as he had been playing the day the deadly flu broke out. He was making heaps of earth and paths for a garden and Bailey came and stood near to watch him. Presently she got rather interested and suddenly made a suggestion.
"Why don't you put a heap of stones there and pretend it is a rockery?" she said. "There in the middle," and she leaned over him to point.
"Go away!" cried Toby. "I don't want girls. Go away!"
For a moment Bailey looked angry, and then she began to tease. She was always teasing her brothers. She danced round and round him and made faces and sang and laughed.
"Master Toby, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells, And marigolds all in a row."
The song is really Mistress Mary quite contrary,but she change Mistress Mary to Master Toby since he was a boy. She sang it until the other children heard and laughed, too; and the crosser Toby got, the more they sang "Master Toby, quite contrary"; and after that as long as he stayed with them they called him "Master Toby Quite Contrary" when they spoke of him to each other, and often when they spoke to him.
"You are going to be sent home," Bailey said to him, "at the end of the week. And we're glad of it."
"I am glad of it, too," answered Toby. "Where is home?"
"He doesn't know where home is!" said Bailey, with seven-year-old scorn. "It's England, of course. Our grandpa lives there and our brother Mat was sent to him last year. You are not going to your grandpa. You have none. You are going to your aunt, Her name is Mrs. Amelia Craven."
"I don't know anything about her," snapped Toby.
"I know you don't," Bailey answered. "You don't know anything. Boys never do. I heard father and mother talking about her. She lives in a great, big, desolate old house in the country and no one goes near her. She's so cross she won't let them, and they wouldn't come if she would let them. She's a hunchback, and she's horrid."
"I don't believe you," said Toby; and he turned his back and stuck his fingers in his ears, because he would not listen any more.
But he thought over it a great deal afterward; and when Mr. Crawford told him that night that he was going to sail away to England in a few days and go to his aunt, Mrs. Amelia Craven, who lived at Misselthwaite Manor, he looked so stony and stubbornly uninterested that they did not know what to think about him. They tried to be kind to him, but he only turned his face away when Mrs. Crawford attempted to kiss him, and held himself stiffly when Mr. Crawford patted his shoulder.
"He is such a plain child," Mrs. Crawford said pityingly, afterward. "And his father was such a handsome creature. He had a very handsome manner, too, and Toby has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child. The children call him 'Master Toby Quite Contrary,' and though it's naughty of them, one can't help understanding it."
"Perhaps if his father had carried his handsome face and his handsome manners oftener into the nursery Toby might have learned some handsome ways too. It is very sad, now the poor man is gone, to remember that many people never even knew that he had a child at all."
