The Envoy of the Slugs

A slug arrived at the gate on the eleventh morning, and it was carrying a leaf, and it had set out on Sunday.

It was not, at first, clear that it had arrived. A slug's arrival is a matter of definition. It was on the path below the gatepost, where it had been since some time on Tuesday, and it was moving, in the sense that a season moves, and it had the leaf held up on its back the way the beetle holds a letter, and it was a moment before anyone noticed that the leaf had writing on it, and that the slug had, in the manner of the professionally patient, been waiting to be received.

"Nobody comes in," said Mungo.

"It's in," said Grizel, from the window. "It's been coming in since Tuesday. There's a point at which coming in becomes in, and it passed it, I would say, last night, near the second stone."

Mungo considered this. It is not often that Mungo is presented with a philosophical difficulty at his own gate, and he gave it the whole of his attention, which is to say he did not move for a length of time Grizel afterwards refused to express in Mungos, "on the grounds that a Mungo is a unit of time and this was a unit of slug."¹

Pettigrew settled it. An envoy, she said, from the stool, must be received, whatever it was an envoy of, and the leaf said "ENVOY" at the top, in a script that had taken the slug most of a day, and protocol was protocol. So Kit went down to the path, and knelt by the second stone, and received the envoy of the slugs, which is a sentence the ledger wrote down with visible reluctance.

The terms were on the leaf. The slugs, having conducted a campaign, and having been repelled, and having been in three cases sent home so full of Nettie's mushrooms that they had to be helped over the hedge, proposed peace. Peace was to consist of the beans on alternate nights. The slugs would have the beans on the nights they had them, and the hollow would have the beans on the nights the slugs did not, and both parties would refrain from describing this arrangement to Gnomesby.

Nettie's reply was short, and has been entered as "declined, with gestures," out of respect for the envoy, which had come a long way. Kit's reply, when Nettie had been led to a distance, was that the beans on the plants were the hollow's, and the beans on the ground were nobody's, and the slugs could have those, and that this was the Treaty of the Fallen Bean, and Grizel could write it down. Grizel wrote it down. The slug considered it, over the course of the afternoon, and at dusk it turned round, which took until dark, and began to leave, which it expects to complete on Monday.

Nettie has said that Gnomesby sent it. The ledger has recorded that she said so, and has recorded beside it that the slug was heading the other way.