S SOON AS SHE SAW THE ORPHANED YETIS Agatha gave up all idea of escaping from the secret valley No she would stay and bring the babies up to be God-fearing creatures and give them a mother’s love For she realized at once that the big yeti who had kidnapped her must be a widower who had lost his wife in some tragic accident and that he wanted her to care for his children And care for them she did The very fat blue-eyed baby was a girl and Agatha called her Lucy after the kennel-maid who had been her best friend at Farley Towers The brown eyed yeti who was a boy she called Clarence And of course there was Ambrose with his mad eyes and his squashed face
Ambrose who was always being sat on by the others or falling into mouse-hare holes or getting lost The first thing Agatha did naturally was teach all the yetis to talk Father learned to speak quite quickly even though he was over three hundred years old by the time Agatha came to the valley and it is not so easy to learn things as you get older And of course the children learned as easily as they breathed After that Agatha taught them all the things that her governess had taught her like the importance of good manners not burping after meals not scratching under the armpits however much one itched and never closing one’s ear lids when being spoken to She taught them how to clean between their teeth with a sharpened stick and how to wash their eight toed backward-pointing feet in the stream after they’d been running because smelly feet are not polite She taught them sums and their alphabet and how to sing hymns Best of all she used to tell them stories Soon after she arrived in the valley Father had realized that a well-bred English girl needed somewhere to call home and he had gathered stones and built her a little house no more than a hut really roofing it with branches and grass In the evenings Agatha would sit outside with the yetis around her Once upon a time she would begin The yetis were mad about stories Puss in Boots Jack and the Beanstalk The Three Bears all day they followed her about begging for more As for Ambrose long before dawn Agatha could hear him sitting and breathing outside the entrance to her hut by the time he was two years old he was much too big to get through it waiting and waiting to hear about Ali Baba or poor Cinderella or Dick Whittington’s cat
At first Lady Agatha was surprised by how easily the yetis took to a civilized English upbringing but she soon realized that they were truly kind and considerate by nature not only to each other but to every living thing In the mornings when she combed them they would cup their huge hands to catch the little spiders and beetles that had crept into their hair during the night and release them carefully onto the ground They always looked where they were putting their huge feet avoiding worm casts and spiders nests and molehills in case someone was at home So they were particularly pleased when Agatha taught them to say sorry for you should Always Apologize for Any Inconvenience You Have Caused But when they began to apologize to everything they ate and yetis eat a lot saying Sorry mango Sorry flower Sorry yak-milk pancake Lady Agatha thought that this was going too far Moderation in All Things and taught them to say grace For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful It was not a great improvement They did say grace politely when they sat down to a meal together
