We were afraid to send the hamper by Carter Pat. for fear they should think it was another Avenging Take-in. And that was one reason why we took it ourselves in a cab. The other reason was that we wanted to see them open the hamper, and another was that we wanted—at least Dicky wanted—to have it out man to man with the porter and his wife, and tell them himself how sorry he was.

So we got our gardener to find out secretly when that porter was off duty, and when we knew the times we went to his house at one of them.

Then Dicky got out of the cab and went in and said what he had to say. And then we took in the hamper.

And the old man and his daughter and the porter were most awfully decent to us, and the porter's wife said, "Lor! let bygones be bygones is what I say! Why, we wouldn't never have had this handsome present but for the other. Say no more about it, sir, and thank you kindly, I'm sure."

And we have been friends with them ever since.

We were short of pocket-money for some time, but Oswald does not complain, though the Turk was Dicky's idea entirely. Yet Oswald is just, and he owns that he helped as much as he could in packing the Hamper of the Avenger. Dora paid her share, too, though she wasn't in it. The author does not shrink from owning that this was very decent of Dora.

This is all the story of—

THE TURK IN CHAINS; or, RICHARD'S REVENGE.

(His name is really Richard, the same as Father's. We only call him Dicky for short.)



THE GOLDEN GONDOLA

ALBERT'S uncle is tremendously clever, and he writes books. I have told how he fled to Southern shores with a lady who is rather nice. His having to marry her was partly our fault, but we did not mean to do it, and we were very sorry for what we had done. But afterwards we thought perhaps it was all for the best, because if left alone he might have married widows, or old German governesses, or Murdstone aunts, like Daisy and Denny have, instead of the fortunate lady that we were the cause of his being married by.

The wedding was just before Christmas, and we were all there. And then they went to Rome for a period of time that is spoken of in books as the honeymoon. You know that H.O., my youngest brother, tried to go too, disguised as the contents of a dress-basket—but was betrayed and brought back.

Conversation often takes place about the things you like, and we often spoke of Albert's uncle.

One day we had a ripping game of hide-and-seek-all-over-the-house-and-all-the-lights-out, sometimes called devil-in-the-dark, and never to be played except when your father and uncle are out, because of the screams which the strongest cannot suppress when caught by "he" in unexpectedness and total darkness. The girls do not like this game so much as we do. But it is only fair for them to play it. We have more than once played doll's tea-parties to please them.

Well, when the game was over we were panting like dogs on the hearthrug in front of the common-room fire, and H.O. said—

"I wish Albert's uncle had been here; he does enjoy it so."

Oswald has sometimes thought Albert's uncle only played to please us. But H.O. may be right.

"I wonder if they often play it in Rome," H.O. went on. "That post-card he sent us with the Colly-whats-its-name-on—you know, the round place with the arches. They could have ripping games there——"

"It's not much fun with only two," said Dicky.

"Besides," Dora said, "when people are first married they always sit in balconies and look at the moon, or else at each other's eyes."

"They ought to know what their eyes look like by this time," said Dicky.

"I believe they sit and write poetry about their eyes all day, and only look at each other when they can't think of the rhymes," said Noel.

"I don't believe she knows how, but I'm certain they read aloud to each other out of the poetry books we gave them for wedding presents," Alice said.

"It would be beastly ungrateful if they didn't, especially with their backs all covered with gold like they are," said H.O.

"About those books," said Oswald slowly, now for the first time joining in what was being said; "of course it was jolly decent of Father to get such ripping presents for us to give them. But I've sometimes wished we'd given Albert's uncle a really truly present that we'd chosen ourselves and bought with our own chink."

"I wish we could have done something for him," Noel said; "I'd have killed a dragon for him as soon as look at it, and Mrs. Albert's uncle could have been the Princess, and I would have let him have her."

"Yes," said Dicky; "and we just gave rotten books. But it's no use grizzling over it now. It's all over, and he won't get married again while she's alive."

This was true, for we live in England which is a morganatic empire where more than one wife at a time is not allowed. In the glorious East he might have married again and again and we could have made it all right about the wedding present.

"I wish he was a Turk for some things," said Oswald, and explained why.

"I don't think she would like it," said Dora.

Oswald explained that if he was a Turk, she would be a Turquoise (I think that is the feminine Turk), and so would be used to lots of wives and be lonely without them.

And just then . . . You know what they say about talking of angels, and hearing their wings? (There is another way of saying this, but it is not polite, as the present author knows.)

Well, just then the postman came, and of course we rushed out, and among Father's dull letters we found one addressed to "The Bastables Junior." It had an Italian stamp—not at all a rare one, and it was a poor specimen too, and the post-mark was Roma.

That is what the Italians have got into the habit of calling Rome. I have been told that they put the "a" instead of the "e" because they like to open their mouths as much as possible in that sunny and agreeable climate.

The letter was jolly—it was just like hearing him talk (I mean reading, not hearing, of course, but reading him talk is not grammar, and if you can't be both sensible and grammarical, it is better to be senseless).

"Well, kiddies," it began, and it went on to tell us about things he had seen, not dull pictures and beastly old buildings, but amusing incidents of comic nature. The Italians must be extreme Jugginses for the kind of things he described to be of such everyday occurring. Indeed, Oswald could hardly believe about the soda-water label that the Italian translated for the English traveller so that it said, "To distrust of the Mineral Waters too fountain-like foaming. They spread the shape."

Near the end of the letter came this:—

"You remember the chapter of 'The Golden Gondola' that I wrote for the People's Pageant just before I had the honour to lead to the altar, &c. I mean the one that ends in the subterranean passage, with Geraldine's hair down, and her last hope gone, and the three villains stealing upon her with Venetian subtlety in their hearts and Toledo daggers (specially imported) in their garters? I didn't care much for it myself, you remember. I think I must have been thinking of other things when I wrote it. But you, I recollect, consoled me by refusing to regard it as other than 'ripping.' 'Clinking' was, as I recall it, Oswald's consolatory epithet. You'll weep with me, I feel confident, when you hear that my Editor does not share your sentiments. He writes me that it is not up to my usual form. He fears that the public, &c., and he trusts that in the next chapter, &c. Let us hope that the public will, in this matter, take your views, and not his. Oh! for a really discerning public, just like you—you amiable critics! Albert's new aunt is leaning over my shoulder. I can't break her of the distracting habit. How on earth am I ever to write another line? Greetings to all from

"ALBERT'S UNCLE AND AUNT.

"PS.—She insists on having her name put to this, but of course she didn't write it. I am trying to teach her to spell."

"PSS.—Italian spelling, of course."

"And now," cried Oswald, "I see it all!"

The others didn't. They often don't when Oswald does.

"Why, don't you see!" he patiently explained, for he knows that it is vain to be angry with people because they are not so clever as—as other people. "It's the direct aspiration of Fate. He wants it, does he? Well, he shall have it!"

"What?" said everybody.

"We'll be it."

"What?" was the not very polite remark now repeated by all.

"Why, his discerning public."

And still they all remained quite blind to what was so clear to Oswald, the astute and discernful.

"It will be much more useful than killing dragons," Oswald went on, "especially as there aren't any; and it will be a really truly wedding present—just what we were wishing we'd given him."

The five others now fell on Oswald and rolled him under the table and sat on his head so that he had to speak loudly and plainly.



"All right! I'll tell you—in words of one syllable if you like. Let go, I say!" And when he had rolled out with the others and the tablecloth that caught on H.O.'s boots and the books and Dora's workbox, and the glass of paint-water that came down with it, he said—

"We will be the public. We will all write to the editor of the People's Pageant and tell him what we think about the Geraldine chapter. Do mop up that water, Dora; it's running all under where I'm sitting."

"Don't you think," said Dora, devoting her handkerchief and Alice's in the obedient way she does not always use, "that six letters, all signed 'Bastable,' and all coming from the same house, would be rather—rather——"

"A bit too thick? Yes," said Alice; "but of course we'd have all different names and addresses."

"We might as well do it thoroughly," said Dicky, "and send three or four different letters each."

"And have them posted in different parts of London. Right oh!" remarked Oswald.

"I shall write a piece of poetry for mine," said Noel.

"They ought all to be on different kinds of paper," said Oswald. "Let's go out and get the paper directly after tea."

We did, but we could only get fifteen different kinds of paper and envelopes, though we went to every shop in the village.

At the first shop, when we said, "Please we want a penn'orth of paper and envelopes of each of all the different kinds you keep," the lady of the shop looked at us thinly over blue-rimmed spectacles and said, "What for?"

And H.O. said, "To write unonymous letters."

"Anonymous letters are very wrong," the lady said, and she wouldn't sell us any paper at all.

But at the other places we did not say what it was for, and they sold it us. There were bluey and yellowy and grey and white kinds, and some was violetish with violets on it, and some pink, with roses. The girls took the florivorous ones, which Oswald thinks are unmanly for any but girls, but you excuse their using it. It seems natural to them to mess about like that.

We wrote the fifteen letters, disguising our handwritings as much as we could. It was not easy. Oswald tried to write one of them with his left hand, but the consequences were almost totally unreadable. Besides, if any one could have read it, they would only have thought it was written in an asylum for the insane, the writing was so delirious. So he chucked it.

Noel was only allowed to write one poem. It began—

"Oh, Geraldine! Oh, Geraldine! You are the loveliest heroine! I never read about one before That made me want to write more Poetry. And your Venetian eyes, They must have been an awful size; And black and blue, and like your hair, And your nose and chin were a perfect pair."

and so on for ages.

The other letters were all saying what a beautiful chapter "Beneath the Doge's Home" was, and how we liked it better than the other chapters before, and how we hoped the next would be like it. We found out when all too late that H.O. had called it the "Dog's Home." But we hoped this would pass unnoticed among all the others. We read the reviews of books in the old Spectators and Athenaeums, and put in the words they say there about other people's books. We said we thought that chapter about Geraldine and the garters was "subtle" and "masterly" and "inevitable"—that it had an "old-world charm," and was "redolent of the soil." We said, too, that we had "read it with breathless interest from cover to cover," and that it had "poignant pathos and a convincing realism," and the "fine flower of delicate sentiment," besides much other rot that the author can't remember.

When all the letters were done we addressed them and stamped them and licked them down, and then we got different people to post them. Our under-gardener, who lives in Greenwich, and the other under-gardener, who lives in Lewisham, and the servants on their evenings out, which they spend in distant spots like Plaistow and Grove Park—each had a letter to post. The piano-tuner was a great catch—he lived in Highgate; and the electric-bell man was Lambeth. So we got rid of all the letters, and watched the post for a reply. We watched for a week, but no answer came.

You think, perhaps, that we were duffers to watch for a reply when we had signed all the letters with fancy names like Daisy Dolman, Everard St. Maur, and Sir Cholmondely Marjoribanks, and put fancy addresses on them, like Chatsworth House, Loampit Vale, and The Bungalow, Eaton Square. But we were not such idiots as you think, dear reader, and you are not so extra clever as you think, either. We had written one letter (it had the grandest Spectator words in it) on our own letter-paper, with the address on the top and the uncle's coat-of-arms outside the envelope. Oswald's real own name was signed to this letter, and this was the one we looked for the answer to. See?

But that answer did not come. And when three long days had passed away we all felt most awfully stale about it. Knowing the great good we had done for Albert's uncle made our interior feelings very little better, if at all.

And on the fourth day Oswald spoke up and said what was in everybody's inside heart. He said—

"This is futile rot. I vote we write and ask that editor why he doesn't answer letters."

"He wouldn't answer that one any more than he did the other," said Noel. "Why should he? He knows you can't do anything to him for not."

"Why shouldn't we go and ask him?" H.O. said. "He couldn't not answer us if we was all there, staring him in the face."

"I don't suppose he'd see you," said Dora; "and it's 'were,' not 'was.'"

"The other editor did when I got the guinea for my beautiful poems," Noel reminded us.

"Yes," said the thoughtful Oswald; "but then it doesn't matter how young you are when you're just a poetry-seller. But we're the discerning public now, and he'd think we ought to be grown up. I say, Dora, suppose you rigged yourself up in old Blakie's things. You'd look quite twenty or thirty."

Dora looked frightened, and said she thought we'd better not.

But Alice said, "Well, I will, then. I don't care. I'm as tall as Dora. But I won't go alone. Oswald, you'll have to dress up old and come too. It's not much to do for Albert's uncle's sake."

"You know you'll enjoy it," said Dora, and she may have wished that she did not so often think that we had better not. However, the dye was now cast, and the remainder of this adventure was doomed to be coloured by the dye we now prepared. (This is an allegory. It means we had burned our boats. And that is another.)

We decided to do the deed next day, and during the evening Dicky and Oswald went out and bought a grey beard and moustache, which was the only thing we could think of to disguise the manly and youthful form of the bold Oswald into the mature shape of a grown-up and discerning public character.

Meanwhile, the girls made tiptoe and brigand-like excursions into Miss Blake's room (she is the housekeeper) and got several things. Among others, a sort of undecided thing like part of a wig, which Miss Blake wears on Sundays. Jane, our housemaid, says it is called a "transformation," and that duchesses wear them.

We had to be very secret about the dressing-up that night, and to put Blakie's things all back when they had been tried on.

Dora did Alice's hair. She twisted up what little hair Alice has got by natural means, and tied on a long tail of hair that was Miss Blake's too. Then she twisted that up, bun-like, with many hairpins. Then the wiglet, or transformation, was plastered over the front part, and Miss Blake's Sunday hat, which is of a very brisk character, with half a blue bird in it, was placed on top of everything. There were several petticoats used, and a brown dress and some stockings and hankies to stuff it out where it was too big. A black jacket and crimson tie completed the picture. We thought Alice would do.

Then Oswald went out of the room and secretly assumed his dark disguise. But when he came in with the beard on, and a hat of Father's, the others were not struck with admiration and respect, like he meant them to be. They rolled about, roaring with laughter, and when he crept into Miss Blake's room and turned up the gas a bit, and looked in her long glass, he owned that they were right and that it was no go. He is tall for his age, but that beard made him look like some horrible dwarf; and his hair being so short added to everything. Any idiot could have seen that the beard had not originally flourished where it now was, but had been transplanted from some other place of growth.

And when he laughed, which now became necessary, he really did look most awful. He has read of beards wagging, but he never saw it before.

While he was looking at himself the girls had thought of a new idea.

But Oswald had an inside presentiment that made it some time before he could even consent to listen to it. But at last, when the others reminded him that it was a noble act, and for the good of Albert's uncle, he let them explain the horrid scheme in all its lurid parts.

It was this: That Oswald should consent to be disguised in women's raiments and go with Alice to see the Editor.

No man ever wants to be a woman, and it was a bitter thing for Oswald's pride, but at last he consented. He is glad he is not a girl. You have no idea what it is like to wear petticoats, especially long ones. I wonder that ladies continue to endure their miserable existences. The top parts of the clothes, too, seemed to be too tight and too loose in the wrong places. Oswald's head, also, was terribly in the way. He had no wandering hairs to fasten transformations on to, even if Miss Blake had had another one, which was not the case. But the girls remembered a governess they had once witnessed whose hair was brief as any boy's, so they put a large hat, with a very tight elastic behind, on to Oswald's head, just as it was, and then with a tickly, pussyish, featherish thing round his neck, hanging wobblily down in long ends, he looked more young-lady-like than he will ever feel.

Some courage was needed for the start next day. Things look so different in the daylight.

"Remember Lord Nithsdale coming out of the Tower," said Alice. "Think of the great cause and be brave," and she tied his neck up.

"I'm brave all right," said Oswald, "only I do feel such an ass."

"I feel rather an ape myself," Alice owned, "but I've got three-penn'orth of peppermints to inspire us with bravery. It is called Dutch courage, I believe."

Owing to our telling Jane we managed to get out unseen by Blakie.

All the others would come, too, in their natural appearance, except that we made them wash their hands and faces. We happened to be flush of chink, so we let them come.

"But if you do," Oswald said, "you must surround us in a hollow square of four."

So they did. And we got down to the station all right. But in the train there were two ladies who stared, and porters and people like that came round the window far more than there could be any need for. Oswald's boots must have shown as he got in. He had forgotten to borrow a pair of Jane's, as he had meant to, and the ones he had on were his largest. His ears got hotter and hotter, and it got more and more difficult to manage his feet and hands. He failed to suck any courage, of any nation, from the peppermints.



Owing to the state Oswald's ears were now in, we agreed to take a cab at Cannon Street. We all crammed in somehow, but Oswald saw the driver wink as he put his boot on the step, and the porter who was opening the cab door winked back, and I am sorry to say Oswald forgot that he was a high-born lady, and he told the porter that he had better jolly well stow his cheek. Then several bystanders began to try and be funny, and Oswald knew exactly what particular sort of fool he was being.

But he bravely silenced the fierce warnings of his ears, and when we got to the Editor's address we sent Dick up with a large card that we had written on,

"MISS DAISY DOLMAN and THE RIGHT HONOURABLE MISS ETHELTRUDA BUSTLER. On urgent business."

and Oswald kept himself and Alice concealed in the cab till the return of the messenger.

"All right; you're to go up," Dicky came back and said; "but the boy grinned who told me so. You'd better be jolly careful."

We bolted like rabbits across the pavement and up the Editor's stairs.

He was very polite. He asked us to sit down, and Oswald did. But first he tumbled over the front of his dress because it would get under his boots, and he was afraid to hold it up, not having practised doing this.

"I think I have had letters from you?" said the Editor.



Alice, who looked terrible with the transformation leaning right-ear-ward, said yes, and that we had come to say what a fine, bold conception we thought the Doge's chapter was. This was what we had settled to say, but she needn't have burst out with it like that. I suppose she forgot herself. Oswald, in the agitation of his clothes, could say nothing. The elastic of the hat seemed to be very slowly slipping up the back of his head, and he knew that, if it once passed the bump that backs of heads are made with, the hat would spring from his head like an arrow from a bow. And all would be frustrated.

"Yes," said the Editor; "that chapter seems to have had a great success—a wonderful success. I had no fewer than sixteen letters about it, all praising it in unmeasured terms." He looked at Oswald's boots, which Oswald had neglected to cover over with his petticoats. He now did this.

"It is a nice story, you know," said Alice timidly.

"So it seems," the gentleman went on. "Fourteen of the sixteen letters bear the Blackheath postmark. The enthusiasm for the chapter would seem to be mainly local."

Oswald would not look at Alice. He could not trust himself, with her looking like she did. He knew at once that only the piano-tuner and the electric bell man had been faithful to their trust. The others had all posted their letters in the pillar-box just outside our gate. They wanted to get rid of them as quickly as they could, I suppose. Selfishness is a vile quality.

The author cannot deny that Oswald now wished he hadn't. The elastic was certainly moving, slowly, but too surely. Oswald tried to check its career by swelling out the bump on the back of his head, but he could not think of the right way to do this.

"I am very pleased to see you," the Editor went on slowly, and there was something about the way he spoke that made Oswald think of a cat playing with a mouse. "Perhaps you can tell me. Are there many spiritualists in Blackheath? Many clairvoyants?"

"Eh?" said Alice, forgetting that that is not the way to behave.

"People who foretell the future?" he said.

"I don't think so," said Alice. "Why?"

His eye twinkled. Oswald saw he had wanted her to ask this.

"Because," said the Editor, more slowly than ever, "I think there must be. How otherwise can we account for that chapter about the 'Doge's Home' being read and admired by sixteen different people before it is even printed. That chapter has not been printed, it has not been published; it will not be published till the May number of the People's Pageant. Yet in Blackheath sixteen people already appreciate its subtlety and its realism and all the rest of it. How do you account for this, Miss Daisy Dolman?"

"I am the Right Honourable Etheltruda," said Alice. "At least—oh, it's no use going on. We are not what we seem."

"Oddly enough, I inferred that at the very beginning of our interview," said the Editor.

Then the elastic finished slipping up Oswald's head at the back, and the hat leapt from his head exactly as he had known it would. He fielded it deftly, however, and it did not touch the ground.

"Concealment," said Oswald, "is at an end."

"So it appears," said the Editor. "Well, I hope next time the author of the 'Golden Gondola' will choose his instruments more carefully."

"He didn't! We aren't!" cried Alice, and she instantly told the Editor everything.

Concealment being at an end, Oswald was able to get at his trousers pocket—it did not matter now how many boots he showed—and to get out Albert's uncle's letter.

Alice was quite eloquent, especially when the Editor had made her take off the hat with the blue bird, and the transformation and the tail, so that he could see what she really looked like. He was quite decent when he really understood how Albert's uncle's threatened marriage must have upset his brain while he was writing that chapter, and pondering on the dark future.

He began to laugh then, and kept it up till the hour of parting.

He advised Alice not to put on the transformation and the tail again to go home in, and she didn't.

Then he said to me: "Are you in a finished state under Miss Daisy Dolman?" and when Oswald said, "Yes," the Editor helped him to take off all the womanly accoutrements, and to do them up in brown paper. And he lent him a cap to go home in.

I never saw a man laugh more. He is an excellent sort.

But no slow passage of years, however many, can ever weaken Oswald's memory of what those petticoats were like to walk in, and how ripping it was to get out of them, and have your own natural legs again.

We parted from that Editor without a strain on anybody's character.

He must have written to Albert's uncle, and told him all, for we got a letter next week. It said—

"MY DEAR KIDDIES,—Art cannot be forced. Nor can Fame. May I beg you for the future to confine your exertions to blowing my trumpet—or Fame's—with your natural voices? Editors may be led, but they won't be druv. The Right Honourable Miss Etheltruda Bustler seems to have aroused a deep pity for me in my Editor's heart. Let that suffice. And for the future permit me, as firmly as affectionately, to reiterate the assurance and the advice which I have so often breathed in your long young ears, 'I am not ungrateful; but I do wish you would mind your own business.'"

"That's just because we were found out," said Alice. "If we'd succeeded he'd have been sitting on the top of the pinnacle of Fame, and he would have owed it all to us. That would have been making him something like a wedding present."

What we had really done was to make something very like——but the author is sure he has said enough.



THE FLYING LODGER

FATHER knows a man called Eustace Sandal. I do not know how to express his inside soul, but I have heard Father say he means well. He is a vegetarian and a Primitive Social Something, and an all-wooler, and things like that, and he is really as good as he can stick, only most awfully dull. I believe he eats bread and milk from choice. Well, he has great magnificent dreams about all the things you can do for other people, and he wants to distill cultivatedness into the sort of people who live in Model Workmen's Dwellings, and teach them to live up to better things. This is what he says. So he gives concerts in Camberwell, and places like that, and curates come from far and near, to sing about Bold Bandaleros and the Song of the Bow, and people who have escaped being curates give comic recitings, and he is sure that it does every one good, and "gives them glimpses of the Life Beautiful." He said that. Oswald heard him with his own trustworthy ears. Anyway the people enjoy the concerts no end, and that's the great thing.

Well, he came one night, with a lot of tickets he wanted to sell, and Father bought some for the servants, and Dora happened to go in to get the gum for a kite we were making, and Mr. Sandal said, "Well, my little maiden, would you not like to come on Thursday evening, and share in the task of raising our poor brothers and sisters to the higher levels of culture?" So of course Dora said she would, very much. Then he explained about the concert, calling her "My little one," and "dear child," which Alice never would have borne, but Dora is not of a sensitive nature, and hardly minds what she is called, so long as it is not names, which she does not deem "dear child" and cetera to be, though Oswald would.

Dora was quite excited about it, and the stranger so worked upon her feelings that she accepted the deep responsibility of selling tickets, and for a week there was no bearing her. I believe she did sell nine, to people in Lewisham and New Cross who knew no better. And Father bought tickets for all of us, and when the eventful evening dawned we went to Camberwell by train and tram via Miss Blake (that means we shouldn't have been allowed to go without her).

The tram ride was rather jolly, but when we got out and walked we felt like "Alone in London," or "Jessica's First Prayer," because Camberwell is a devastating region that makes you think of rickety attics with the wind whistling through them, or miserable cellars where forsaken children do wonders by pawning their relations' clothes and looking after the baby. It was a dampish night, and we walked on greasy mud. And as we walked along Alice kicked against something on the pavement, and it chinked, and when she picked it up it was five bob rolled up in newspaper.

"I expect it's somebody's little all," said Alice, "and the cup was dashed from their lips just when they were going to joyfully spend it. We ought to give it to the police."

But Miss Blake said no, and that we were late already, so we went on, and Alice held the packet in her muff throughout the concert which ensued. I will not tell you anything about the concert except that it was quite fairly jolly—you must have been to these Self-Raising Concerts in the course of your young lives.

When it was over we reasoned with Miss Blake, and she let us go through the light blue paper door beside the stage and find Mr. Sandal. We thought he might happen to hear who had lost the five bob, and return it to its sorrowing family. He was in a great hurry, but he took the chink and said he'd let us know if anything happened. Then we went home very cheerful, singing bits of the comic songs a bishop's son had done in the concert, and little thinking what we were taking home with us.

It was only a few days after this, or perhaps a week, that we all began to be rather cross. Alice, usually as near a brick as a girl can go, was the worst of the lot, and if you said what you thought of her she instantly began to snivel. And we all had awful colds, and our handkerchiefs gave out, and then our heads ached. Oswald's head was particularly hot, I remember, and he wanted to rest it on the backs of chairs or on tables—or anything steady.

But why prolong the painful narrative? What we had brought home from Camberwell was the measles, and as soon as the grown-ups recognised the Grim Intruder for the fell disease it is we all went to bed, and there was an end of active adventure for some time.

Of course, when you begin to get better there are grapes and other luxuries not of everyday occurrences, but while you're sniffling and fevering in bed, as red as a lobster and blazing hot, you are inclined to think it is a heavy price to pay for any concert, however raising.

Mr. Sandal came to see Father the very day we all marched Bedward. He had found the owner of the five shillings. It was a doctor's fee, about to be paid by the parent of a thoroughly measly family. And if we had taken it to the police at once Alice would not have held it in her hand all through the concert—but I will not blame Blakie. She was a jolly good nurse, and read aloud to us with unfatiguable industry while we were getting better.

Our having fallen victims to this disgusting complaint ended in our being sent to the seaside. Father could not take us himself, so we went to stay with a sister of Mr. Sandal's. She was like him, only more so in every way.

The journey was very joyous. Father saw us off at Cannon Street, and we had a carriage to ourselves all the way, and we passed the station where Oswald would not like to be a porter. Rude boys at this station put their heads out of the window and shout, "Who's a duffer?" and things like that, and the porters have to shout "I am!" because Higham is the name of the station, and porters have seldom any H's with which to protect themselves from this cruel joke.

It was a glorious moment when the train swooped out of a tunnel and we looked over the downs and saw the grey-blue line that was the sea. We had not seen the sea since before Mother died. I believe we older ones all thought of that, and it made us quieter than the younger ones were. I do not want to forget anything, but it makes you feel empty and stupid when you remember some things.

There was a good drive in a waggonette after we got to our station. There were primroses under some of the hedges, and lots of dog-violets. And at last we got to Miss Sandal's house. It is before you come to the village, and it is a little square white house. There is a big old windmill at the back of it. It is not used any more for grinding corn, but fishermen keep their nets in it.

Miss Sandal came out of the green gate to meet us. She had a soft, drab dress and a long thin neck, and her hair was drab too, and it was screwed up tight.

She said, "Welcome, one and all!" in a kind voice, but it was too much like Mr. Sandal's for me. And we went in. She showed us the sitting-rooms, and the rooms where we were to sleep, and then she left us to wash our hands and faces. When we were alone we burst open the doors of our rooms with one consent, and met on the landing with a rush like the great rivers of America.

"Well!" said Oswald, and the others said the same.

"Of all the rummy cribs!" remarked Dicky.

"It's like a workhouse or a hospital," said Dora. "I think I like it."

"It makes me think of bald-headed gentlemen," said H.O., "it is so bare."

It was. All the walls were white plaster, the furniture was white deal—what there was of it, which was precious little. There were no carpets—only white matting. And there was not a single ornament in a single room! There was a clock on the dining-room mantel-piece, but that could not be counted as an ornament because of the useful side of its character. There were only about six pictures—all of a brownish colour. One was the blind girl sitting on an orange with a broken fiddle. It is called Hope.

When we were clean Miss Sandal gave us tea. As we sat down she said, "The motto of our little household is 'Plain living and high thinking.'"

And some of us feared for an instant that this might mean not enough to eat. But fortunately this was not the case. There was plenty, but all of a milky, bunny, fruity, vegetable sort. We soon got used to it, and liked it all right.

Miss Sandal was very kind. She offered to read aloud to us after tea, and, exchanging glances of despair, some of us said that we should like it very much.

It was Oswald who found the manly courage to say very politely—

"Would it be all the same to you if we went and looked at the sea first? Because——"

And she said, "Not at all," adding something about "Nature, the dear old nurse, taking somebody on her knee," and let us go.

We asked her which way, and we tore up the road and through the village and on to the sea-wall, and then with six joyous bounds we leaped down on to the sand.

The author will not bother you with a description of the mighty billows of ocean, which you must have read about, if not seen, but he will just say what perhaps you are not aware of—that seagulls eat clams and mussels and cockles, and crack the shells with their beaks. The author has seen this done.

You also know, I suppose, that you can dig in the sand (if you have a spade) and make sand castles, and stay in them till the tide washes you out.

I will say no more, except that when we gazed upon the sea and the sand we felt we did not care tuppence how highly Miss Sandal might think of us or how plainly she might make us live, so long as we had got the briny deep to go down to.

It was too early in the year and too late in the day to bathe, but we paddled, which comes to much the same thing, and you almost always have to change everything afterwards.

When it got dark we had to go back to the White House, and there was supper, and then we found that Miss Sandal did not keep a servant, so of course we offered to help wash up. H.O. only broke two plates.

Nothing worth telling about happened till we had been there over a week, and had got to know the coastguards and a lot of the village people quite well. I do like coastguards. They seem to know everything you want to hear about. Miss Sandal used to read to us out of poetry books, and about a chap called Thoreau, who could tickle fish, and they liked it, and let him. She was kind, but rather like her house—there was something bare and bald about her inside mind, I believe. She was very, very calm, and said that people who lost their tempers were not living the higher life. But one day a telegram came, and then she was not calm at all. She got quite like other people, and quite shoved H.O. for getting in her way when she was looking for her purse to pay for the answer to the telegram.

Then she said to Dora—and she was pale and her eyes red, just like people who live the lower or ordinary life—"My dears, it's dreadful! My poor brother! He's had a fall. I must go to him at once." And she sent Oswald to order the fly from the Old Ship Hotel, and the girls to see if Mrs. Beale would come and take care of us while she was away. Then she kissed us all and went off very unhappy. We heard afterwards that poor, worthy Mr. Sandal had climbed a scaffolding to give a workman a tract about drink, and he didn't know the proper part of the scaffolding to stand on (the workman did, of course) so he fetched down half a dozen planks and the workman, and if a dust-cart hadn't happened to be passing just under so that they fell into it their lives would not have been spared. As it was Mr. Sandal broke his arm and his head. The workman escaped unscathed but furious. The workman was a teetotaler.

Mrs. Beale came, and the first thing she did was to buy a leg of mutton and cook it. It was the first meat we had had since arriving at Lymchurch.



"I 'spect she can't afford good butcher's meat," said Mrs. Beale; "but your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he'd like you to have your fill of something as'll lay acrost your chesties." So she made a Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.

After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than we had felt for days, and Dora said—

"Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I wish we could do something to help her."

"We might go out street-singing," Noel said. But that was no good, because there is only one street in the village, and the people there are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.

Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this would never do.

Then suddenly a thought struck some one—I will not say who—and that some one said—

"She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch."

That was the beginning of it. The end—for that day—was our getting the top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.

LODGINGS TO LET.

ENQUIRE INSIDE.

We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.

In the morning when Oswald drew up his blind there was quite a crowd of kids looking at the card. Mrs. Beale came out and shoo-ed them away as if they were hens. And we did not have to explain the card to her at all. She never said anything about it. I never knew such a woman as Mrs. Beale for minding her own business. She said afterwards she supposed Miss Sandal had told us to put up the card.

Well, two or three days went by, and nothing happened, only we had a letter from Miss Sandal, telling us how the poor sufferer was groaning, and one from Father telling us to be good children, and not get into scrapes. And people who drove by used to look at the card and laugh.

And then one day a carriage came driving up with a gentleman in it, and he saw the rainbow beauty of our chalked card, and he got out and came up the path. He had a pale face, and white hair and very bright eyes that moved about quickly like a bird's, and he was dressed in a quite new tweed suit that did not fit him very well.

Dora and Alice answered the door before any one had time to knock, and the author has reason to believe their hearts were beating wildly.

"How much?" said the gentleman shortly.

Alice and Dora were so surprised by his suddenness that they could only reply—

"Er—er——"

"Just so," said the gentleman briskly as Oswald stepped modestly forward and said—

"Won't you come inside?"

"The very thing," said he, and came in.

We showed him into the dining-room and asked him to excuse us a minute, and then held a breathless council outside the door.

"It depends how many rooms he wants," said Dora.

"Let's say so much a room," said Dicky, "and extra if he wants Mrs. Beale to wait on him."

So we decided to do this. We thought a pound a room seemed fair.

And we went back.

"How many rooms do you want?" Oswald asked.

"All the room there is," said the gentleman.

"They are a pound each," said Oswald, "and extra for Mrs. Beale."

"How much altogether?"

Oswald thought a minute and then said "Nine rooms is nine pounds, and two pounds a week for Mrs. Beale, because she is a widow."



"Done!" said the gentleman. "I'll go and fetch my portmanteaus."

He bounced up and out and got into his carriage and drove away. It was not till he was finally gone quite beyond recall that Alice suddenly said—

"But if he has all the rooms where are we to sleep?"

"He must be awfully rich," said H.O., "wanting all those rooms."

"Well, he can't sleep in more than one at once," said Dicky, "however rich he is. We might wait till he was bedded down and then sleep in the rooms he didn't want."

But Oswald was firm. He knew that if the man paid for the rooms he must have them to himself.

"He won't sleep in the kitchen," said Dora; "couldn't we sleep there?"

But we all said we couldn't and wouldn't.

Then Alice suddenly said—

"I know! The Mill. There are heaps and heaps of fishing-nets there, and we could each take a blanket like Indians and creep over under cover of the night after the Beale has gone, and get back before she comes in the morning."

It seemed a sporting thing to do, and we agreed. Only Dora said she thought it would be draughty.

Of course we went over to the Mill at once to lay our plans and prepare for the silent watches of the night.

There are three stories to a windmill, besides the ground-floor. The first floor is pretty empty; the next is nearly full of millstones and machinery, and the one above is where the corn runs down from on to the millstones.

We settled to let the girls have the first floor, which was covered with heaps of nets, and we would pig in with the millstones on the floor above.

We had just secretly got out the last of the six blankets from the house and got it into the Mill disguised in a clothes-basket, when we heard wheels, and there was the gentleman back again. He had only got one portmanteau after all, and that was a very little one.

Mrs. Beale was bobbing at him in the doorway when we got up. Of course we had told her he had rented rooms, but we had not said how many, for fear she should ask where we were going to sleep, and we had a feeling that but few grown-ups would like our sleeping in a mill, however much we were living the higher life by sacrificing ourselves to get money for Miss Sandal.

The gentleman ordered sheep's-head and trotters for dinner, and when he found he could not have that he said—

"Gammon and spinach!"

But there was not any spinach in the village, so he had to fall back on eggs and bacon. Mrs. Beale cooked it, and when he had fallen back on it she washed up and went home. And we were left. We could hear the gentleman singing to himself, something about woulding he was a bird that he might fly to thee.

Then we got the lanterns that you take when you go "up street" on a dark night, and we crept over to the Mill. It was much darker than we expected.

We decided to keep our clothes on, partly for warmness and partly in case of any sudden alarm or the fishermen wanting their nets in the middle of the night, which sometimes happens if the tide is favourable.

We let the girls keep the lantern, and we went up with a bit of candle Dicky had saved, and tried to get comfortable among the millstones and machinery, but it was not easy, and Oswald, for one, was not sorry when he heard the voice of Dora calling in trembling tones from the floor below.

"Oswald! Dicky!" said the voice, "I wish one of you would come down a sec."

Oswald flew to the assistance of his distressed sister.

"It's only that we're a little bit uncomfortable," she whispered. "I didn't want to yell it out because of Noel and H.O. I don't want to frighten them, but I can't help feeling that if anything popped out of the dark at us I should die. Can't you all come down here? The nets are quite comfortable, and I do wish you would."

Alice said she was not frightened, but suppose there were rats, which are said to infest old buildings, especially mills?

So we consented to come down, and we told Noel and H.O. to come down because it was more comfy, and it is easier to settle yourself for the night among fishing-nets than among machinery. There was a rustling now and then among the heap of broken chairs and jack-planes and baskets and spades and hoes and bits of the spars of ships at the far end of our sleeping apartment, but Dicky and Oswald resolutely said it was the wind or else jackdaws making their nests, though, of course, they knew this is not done at night.

Sleeping in a mill was not nearly the fun we had thought it would be—somehow. For one thing, it was horrid not having a pillow, and the fishing-nets were so stiff you could not bunch them up properly to make one. And unless you have been born and bred a Red Indian you do not know how to manage your blanket so as to make it keep out the draughts. And when we had put out the light Oswald more than once felt as though earwigs and spiders were walking on his face in the dark, but when we struck a match there was nothing there.

And empty mills do creak and rustle and move about in a very odd way. Oswald was not afraid, but he did think we might as well have slept in the kitchen, because the gentleman could not have wanted to use that when he was asleep. You see, we thought then that he would sleep all night like other people.

We got to sleep at last, and in the night the girls edged up to their bold brothers, so that when the morning sun "shone in bars of dusty gold through the chinks of the aged edifice" and woke us up we were all lying in a snuggly heap like a litter of puppies.

"Oh, I am so stiff!" said Alice, stretching. "I never slept in my clothes before. It makes me feel as if I had been starched and ironed like a boy's collar."

We all felt pretty much the same. And our faces were tired too, and stiff, which was rum, and the author cannot account for it, unless it really was spiders that walked on us. I believe the ancient Greeks considered them to be venomous, and perhaps that's how their venom influences their victims.

"I think mills are merely beastly," remarked H.O. when we had woke him up. "You can't wash yourself or brush your hair or anything."

"You aren't always so jolly particular about your hair," said Dicky.

"Don't be so disagreeable," said Dora.

And Dicky rejoined, "Disagreeable yourself!"

There is certainly something about sleeping in your clothes that makes you feel not so kind and polite as usual. I expect this is why tramps are so fierce and knock people down in lonely roads and kick them. Oswald knows he felt just like kicking any one if they had happened to cheek him the least little bit. But by a fortunate accident nobody did.

The author believes there is a picture called "Hopeless Dawn." We felt exactly like that. Nothing seemed the least bit of good.

It was a pitiful band with hands and faces dirtier than any one would believe who had not slept in a mill or witnessed others who had done so, that crossed the wet, green grass between the Mill and the white house.

"I shan't ever put morning dew into my poetry again," Noel said; "it is not nearly so poetical as people make out, and it is as cold as ice, right through your boots."

We felt rather better when we had had a good splash in the brick-paved back kitchen that Miss Sandal calls the bath-room. And Alice made a fire and boiled a kettle and we had some tea and eggs. Then we looked at the clock and it was half-past five. So we hastened to get into another part of the house before Mrs. Beale came.

"I wish we'd tried to live the higher life some less beastly way," said Dicky as we went along the passage.

"Living the higher life always hurts at the beginning," Alice said. "I expect it's like new boots, only when you've got used to it you're glad you bore it at first. Let's listen at the doors till we find out where he isn't sleeping."

So we listened at all the bedroom doors, but not a snore was heard.

"Perhaps he was a burglar," said H.O., "and only pretended to want lodgings so as to get in and bone all the valuables."

"There aren't any valuables," said Noel, and this was quite true, for Miss Sandal had no silver or jewellery except a brooch of pewter, and the very teaspoons were of wood—very hard to keep clean and having to be scraped.

"Perhaps he sleeps without snoring," said Oswald, "some people do."

"Not old gentlemen," said Noel; "think of our Indian uncle—H.O. used to think it was bears at first."

"Perhaps he rises with the lark," said Alice, "and is wondering why brekker isn't ready."

So then we listened at the sitting-room doors, and through the keyhole of the parlour we heard a noise of some one moving, and then in a soft whistle the tune of the "Would I were a bird" song.

So then we went into the dining-room to sit down. But when we opened the door we almost fell in a heap on the matting, and no one had breath for a word—not even for "Krikey," which was what we all thought.

I have read of people who could not believe their eyes; and I have always thought it such rot of them, but now, as the author gazed on the scene, he really could not be quite sure that he was not in a dream, and that the gentleman and the night in the Mill weren't dreams too.

"Pull back the curtains," Alice said, and we did. I wish I could make the reader feel as astonished as we did.

The last time we had seen the room the walls had been bare and white. Now they were covered with the most splendid drawings you can think of, all done in coloured chalk—I don't mean mixed up, like we do with our chalks—but one picture was done in green, and another in brown, and another in red, and so on. And the chalk must have been of some fat radiant kind quite unknown to us, for some of the lines were over an inch thick.

"How perfectly lovely!" Alice said; "he must have sat up all night to do it. He is good. I expect he's trying to live the higher life, too—just going about doing secretly, and spending his time making other people's houses pretty."

"I wonder what he'd have done if the room had had a large pattern of brown roses on it, like Mrs. Beale's," said Noel. "I say, look at that angel! Isn't it poetical? It makes me feel I must write something about it."

It was a good angel—all drawn in grey, that was—with very wide wings going right across the room, and a whole bundle of lilies in his arms. Then there were seagulls and ravens, and butterflies, and ballet girls with butterflies' wings, and a man with artificial wings being fastened on, and you could see he was just going to jump off a rock. And there were fairies, and bats, and flying-foxes, and flying-fish. And one glorious winged horse done in red chalk—and his wings went from one side of the room to the other, and crossed the angel's. There were dozens and dozens of birds—all done in just a few lines—but exactly right. You couldn't make any mistake about what anything was meant for.

And all the things, whatever they were, had wings to them. How Oswald wishes that those pictures had been done in his house!

While we stood gazing, the door of the other room opened, and the gentleman stood before us, more covered with different-coloured chalks than I should have thought he could have got, even with all those drawings, and he had a thing made of wire and paper in his hand, and he said—

"Wouldn't you like to fly?"

"Yes," said every one.

"Well then," he said, "I've got a nice little flying-machine here. I'll fit it on to one of you, and then you jump out of the attic window. You don't know what it's like to fly."

We said we would rather not.

"But I insist," said the gentleman. "I have your real interest at heart, my children—I can't allow you in your ignorance to reject the chance of a lifetime."

We still said "No, thank you," and we began to feel very uncomfy, for the gentleman's eyes were now rolling wildly.

"Then I'll make you!" he said, catching hold of Oswald.



"You jolly well won't," cried Dicky, catching hold of the arm of the gentleman.

Then Dora said very primly and speaking rather slowly, and she was very pale—

"I think it would be lovely to fly. Will you just show me how the flying-machine looks when it is unfolded?"

The gentleman dropped Oswald, and Dora made "Go! go" with her lips without speaking, while he began to unfold the flying-machine. We others went, Oswald lingering last, and then in an instant Dora had nipped out of the room and banged the door and locked it.

"To the Mill!" she cried, and we ran like mad, and got in and barred the big door, and went up to the first floor, and looked out of the big window to warn off Mrs. Beale.

And we thumped Dora on the back, and Dicky called her a Sherlock Holmes, and Noel said she was a heroine.

"It wasn't anything," Dora said, just before she began to cry, "only I remember reading that you must pretend to humour them, and then get away, for of course I saw at once he was a lunatic. Oh, how awful it might have been! He could have made us all jump out of the attic window, and there would have been no one left to tell Father. Oh! oh!" and then the crying began.

But we were proud of Dora, and I am sorry we make fun of her sometimes, but it is difficult not to.

We decided to signal the first person that passed, and we got Alice to take off her red flannel petticoat for a signal.

The first people who came were two men in a dog-cart. We waved the signalising petticoat and they pulled up, and one got out and came up to the Mill.

We explained about the lunatic and the wanting us to jump out of the windows.

"Right oh!" cried the man to the one still in the cart; "got him." And the other hitched the horse to the gate and came over, and the other went to the house.

"Come along down, young ladies and gentlemen," said the second man when he had been told. "He's as gentle as a lamb. He does not think it hurts to jump out of windows. He thinks it really is flying. He'll be like an angel when he sees the doctor."

We asked if he had been mad before, because we had thought he might have suddenly gone so.

"Certainly he has!" replied the man; "he has never been, so to say, himself since tumbling out of a flying-machine he went up in with a friend. He was an artist previous to that—an excellent one, I believe. But now he only draws objects with wings—and now and then he wants to make people fly—perfect strangers sometimes, like yourselves. Yes, miss, I am his attendant, and his pictures often amuse me by the half-hours together, poor gentleman."

"How did he get away?" Alice asked.

"Well, miss, the poor gentleman's brother got hurt and Mr. Sidney—that's him inside—seemed wonderfully put out and hung over the body in a way pitiful to see. But really he was extracting the cash from the sufferer's pockets. Then, while all of us were occupied with Mr. Eustace, Mr. Sidney just packs his portmanteau and out he goes by the back door. When we missed him we sent for Dr. Baker, but by the time he came it was too late to get here. Dr. Baker said at once he'd revert to his boyhood's home. And the doctor has proved correct."

We had all come out of the Mill, and with this polite person we went to the gate, and saw the lunatic get into the carriage, very gentle and gay.

"But, Doctor," Oswald said, "he did say he'd give nine pounds a week for the rooms. Oughtn't he to pay?"

"You might have known he was mad to say that," said the doctor. "No. Why should he, when it's his own sister's house? Gee up!"

And he left us.

It was sad to find the gentleman was not a Higher Life after all, but only mad. And I was more sorry than ever for poor Miss Sandal. As Oswald pointed out to the girls they are much more blessed in their brothers than Miss Sandal is, and they ought to be more grateful than they are.



THE SMUGGLER'S REVENGE

THE days went on and Miss Sandal did not return. We went on being very sorry about Miss Sandal being so poor, and it was not our fault that when we tried to let the house in lodgings, the first lodger proved to be a lunatic of the deepest dye. Miss Sandal must have been a fairly decent sort, because she seems not to have written to Father about it. At any rate he didn't give it us in any of our letters, about our good intentions and their ending in a maniac.

Oswald does not like giving up a thing just because it has once been muffed. The muffage of a plan is a thing that often happens at first to heroes—like Bruce and the spider, and other great characters. Beside, grown-ups always say—

"If at first you don't succeed, Try, try, try again!"

And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when what you are after is your own idea, and not just the rotten notion of that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who composed the multiplication table. So we often talked about what we could do to make Miss Sandal rich. It gave us something to jaw about when we happened to want to sit down for a bit, in between all the glorious wet sandy games that happen by the sea.

Of course if we wanted real improving conversation we used to go up to the boat-house and talk to the coastguards. I do think coastguards are A1. They are just the same as sailors, having been so in their youth, and you can get at them to talk to, which is not the case with sailors who are at sea (or even in harbours) on ships. Even if you had the luck to get on to a man-of-war, you would very likely not be able to climb to the top-gallants to talk to the man there. Though in books the young hero always seems able to climb to the mast-head the moment he is told to. The coastguards told us tales of Southern ports, and of shipwrecks, and officers they had not cottoned to, and messmates that they had, but when we asked them about smuggling they said there wasn't any to speak of nowadays.

"I expect they think they oughtn't to talk about such dark crimes before innocent kids like us," said Dicky afterwards, and he grinned as he said it.

"Yes," said Alice; "they don't know how much we know about smugglers, and bandits, and highwaymen, and burglars, and coiners," and she sighed, and we all felt sad to think that we had not now any chance to play at being these things.

"We might play smugglers," said Oswald.

But he did not speak hopefully. The worst of growing up is that you seem to want more and more to have a bit of the real thing in your games. Oswald could not now be content to play at bandits and just capture Albert next door, as once, in happier days, he was pleased and proud to do.

It was not a coastguard that told us about the smugglers. It was a very old man that we met two or three miles along the beach. He was leaning against a boat that was wrong way up on the shingle, and smoking the strongest tobacco Oswald's young nose has ever met. I think it must have been Black Jack. We said, "How do you do?" and Alice said, "Do you mind if we sit down near you?"

"Not me," replied the aged seafarer. We could see directly that he was this by his jersey and his sea-boots.

The girls sat down on the beach, but we boys leaned against the boat like the seafaring one. We hoped he would join in conversation, but at first he seemed too proud. And there was something dignified about him, bearded and like a Viking, that made it hard for us to begin.

At last he took his pipe out of his mouth and said—

"Here's a precious Quakers' meeting! You didn't set down here just for to look at me?"

"I'm sure you look very nice," Dora said.

"Same to you, miss, I'm sure," was the polite reply.

"We want to talk to you awfully," said Alice, "if you don't mind?"

"Talk away," said he.

And then, as so often happens, no one could think of anything to say.

Suddenly Noel said, "I think you look nice too, but I think you look as though you had a secret history. Have you?"

"Not me," replied the Viking-looking stranger. "I ain't got no history, nor jog-graphy neither. They didn't give us that much schooling when I was a lad."

"Oh!" replied Noel; "but what I really meant was, were you ever a pirate or anything?"

"Never in all my born," replied the stranger, now thoroughly roused; "I'd scorn the haction. I was in the navy, I was, till I lost the sight of my eye, looking too close at gunpowder. Pirates is snakes, and they ought to be killed as such."

We felt rather sorry, for though of course it is very wrong to be a pirate, it is very interesting too. Things are often like this. That is one of the reasons why it is so hard to be truly good.

Dora was the only one who was pleased. She said—

"Yes, pirates are very wrong. And so are highwaymen and smugglers."

"I don't know about highwaymen," the old man replied; "they went out afore my time, worse luck; but my father's great-uncle by the mother's side, he see one hanged once. A fine upstanding fellow he was, and made a speech while they was a-fitting of the rope. All the women was snivelling and sniffing and throwing bokays at him."

"Did any of the bouquets reach him?" asked the interested Alice.

"Not likely," said the old man. "Women can't never shy straight. But I shouldn't wonder but what them posies heartened the chap up a bit. An afterwards they was all a-fightin' to get a bit of the rope he was hung with, for luck."

"Do tell us some more about him," said all of us but Dora.

"I don't know no more about him. He was just hung—that's all. They was precious fond o' hangin' in them old far-away times."

"Did you ever know a smuggler?" asked H.O.—"to speak to, I mean?"

"Ah, that's tellings," said the old man, and he winked at us all.

So then we instantly knew that the coastguards had been mistaken when they said there were no more smugglers now, and that this brave old man would not betray his comrades, even to friendly strangers like us. But of course he could not know exactly how friendly we were. So we told him.

Oswald said—

"We love smugglers. We wouldn't even tell a word about it if you would only tell us."

"There used to be lots of smuggling on these here coasts when my father was a boy," he said; "my own father's cousin, his father took to the smuggling, and he was a doin' so well at it, that what does he do, but goes and gets married, and the Preventives they goes and nabs him on his wedding-day, and walks him straight off from the church door, and claps him in Dover Jail."

"Oh, his poor wife," said Alice, "whatever did she do?"

"She didn't do nothing," said the old man. "It's a woman's place not to do nothing till she's told to. He'd done so well at the smuggling, he'd saved enough by his honest toil to take a little public. So she sets there awaitin' and attendin' to customers—for well she knowed him, as he wasn't the chap to let a bit of a jail stand in the way of his station in life. Well, it was three weeks to a day after the wedding, there comes a dusty chap to the 'Peal of Bells' door. That was the sign over the public, you understand."

We said we did, and breathlessly added, "Go on!"

"A dusty chap he was; got a beard and a patch over one eye, and he come of a afternoon when there was no one about the place but her.

"'Hullo, missis,' says he; 'got a room for a quiet chap?'

"'I don't take in no men-folks,' says she; 'can't be bothered with 'em.'

"'You'll be bothered with me, if I'm not mistaken,' says he.

"'Bothered if I will,' says she.

"'Bothered if you won't,' says he, and with that he ups with his hand and off comes the black patch, and he pulls off the beard and gives her a kiss and a smack on the shoulder. She always said she nearly died when she see it was her new-made bridegroom under the beard.

"So she took her own man in as a lodger, and he went to work up at Upton's Farm with his beard on, and of nights he kept up the smuggling business. And for a year or more no one knowd as it was him. But they got him at last."

"What became of him?" We all asked it.

"He's dead," said the old man. "But, Lord love you, so's everybody as lived in them far-off old ancient days—all dead—Preventives too—and smugglers and gentry: all gone under the daisies."

We felt quite sad. Oswald hastily asked if there wasn't any smuggling now.

"Not hereabouts," the old man answered, rather quickly for him. "Don't you go for to think it. But I did know a young chap—quite young he is with blue eyes—up Sunderland way it was. He'd got a goodish bit o' baccy and stuff done up in a ole shirt. And as he was a-goin' up off of the beach a coastguard jumps out at him, and he says to himself, 'All u. p. this time,' says he. But out loud he says, 'Hullo, Jack, that you? I thought you was a tramp,' says he.

"'What you got in that bundle?' says the coastguard.

"'My washing,' says he, 'and a couple pairs of old boots.'

"Then the coastguard he says, 'Shall I give you a lift with it?' thinking in himself the other chap wouldn't part if it was anything it oughtn't to be. But that young chap was too sharp. He says to himself, 'If I don't he'll nail me, and if I do—well, there's just a chance.'

"So he hands over the bundle, and the coastguard he thinks it must be all right, and he carries it all the way up to his mother's for him, feeling sorry for the mean suspicions he'd had about the poor old chap. But that didn't happen near here. No, no."

I think Dora was going to say, "Old chap—but I thought he was young with blue eyes?" but just at that minute a coastguard came along and ordered us quite harshly not to lean on the boat. He was quite disagreeable about it—how different from our own coastguards! He was from a different station to theirs. The old man got off very slowly. And all the time he was arranging his long legs so as to stand on them, the coastguard went on being disagreeable as hard as he could, in a loud voice.



When our old man had told the coastguard that no one ever lost anything by keeping a civil tongue in his head, we all went away feeling very angry.

Alice took the old man's hand as we went back to the village, and asked him why the coastguard was so horrid.

"They gets notions into their heads," replied the old man; "the most innocentest people they comes to think things about. It's along of there being no smuggling in these ere parts now. The coastguards ain't got nothing to do except think things about honest people."

We parted from the old man very warmly, all shaking hands. He lives at a cottage not quite in the village, and keeps pigs. We did not say goodbye till we had seen all the pigs.

I daresay we should not have gone on disliking that disagreeable coastguard so much if he had not come along one day when we were talking to our own coastguards, and asked why they allowed a pack of young shavers in the boat-house. We went away in silent dignity, but we did not forget, and when we were in bed that night Oswald said—

"Don't you think it would be a good thing if the coastguards had something to do?"

Dicky yawned and said he didn't know.

"I should like to be a smuggler," said Oswald. "Oh, yes, go to sleep if you like; but I've got an idea, and if you'd rather be out of it I'll have Alice instead."

"Fire away!" said Dicky, now full of attention, and leaning on his elbow.

"Well, then," said Oswald, "I think we might be smugglers."

"We've played all those things so jolly often," said Dicky.

"But I don't mean play," said Oswald. "I mean the real thing. Of course we should have to begin in quite a small way. But we should get on in time. And we might make quite a lot for poor Miss Sandal."

"Things that you smuggle are expensive," said Dicky.

"Well, we've got the chink the Indian uncle sent us on Saturday. I'm certain we could do it. We'd get some one to take us out at night in one of the fishing-boats—just tear across to France and buy a keg or a bale or something, and rush back."

"Yes, and get nabbed and put in prison. Not me," said Dicky. "Besides, who'd take us?"

"That old Viking man would," said Oswald; "but of course, if you funk it!"

"I don't funk anything," said Dicky, "bar making an ape of myself. Keep your hair on, Oswald. Look here. Suppose we get a keg with nothing in it—or just water. We should have all the fun, and if we were collared we should have the laugh of that coastguard brute."

Oswald agreed, but he made it a condition that we should call it the keg of brandy, whatever was in it, and Dicky consented.

Smuggling is a manly sport, and girls are not fitted for it by nature. At least Dora is not; and if we had told Alice she would have insisted on dressing as a boy and going too, and we knew Father would not like this. And we thought Noel and H.O. were too young to be smugglers with any hope of success. So Dicky and I kept the idea to ourselves.

We went to see the Viking man the next day. It took us some time to make him understand what we wanted, but when he did understand he slapped his leg many times, and very hard, and declared that we were chips of the old block.

"But I can't go for to let you," he said; "if you was nailed it's the stone jug, bless your hearts."

So then we explained about the keg really having only water in, and he slapped his leg again harder than ever, so that it would really have been painful to any but the hardened leg of an old sea-dog. But the water made his refusals weaker, and at last he said—

"Well, see here, Benenden, him as owns the Mary Sarah, he's often took out a youngster or two for the night's fishing, when their pa's and ma's hadn't no objection. You write your pa, and ask if you mayn't go for the night's fishing, or you get Mr. Charteris to write. He knows it's all right, and often done by visitors' kids, if boys. And if your pa says yes, I'll make it all right with Benenden. But mind, it's just a night's fishing. No need to name no kegs. That's just betwixt ourselves."

So we did exactly as he said. Mr. Charteris is the clergyman. He was quite nice about it, and wrote for us, and Father said "Yes, but be very careful, and don't take the girls or the little ones."

We showed the girls the letter, and that removed the trifling ill-feeling that had grown up through Dick and me having so much secret talk about kegs and not telling the others what was up.

Of course we never breathed a word about kegs in public, and only to each other in bated breaths.

What Father said about not taking the girls or the little ones of course settled any wild ideas Alice might have had of going as a cabin-girl.

The old Viking man, now completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we had been told it would be very cold. Then we said goodbye to our sisters and the little ones, and it was exactly like a picture of the "Tar's Farewell," because we had bundles, with things to eat tied up in blue checked handkerchiefs, and we said goodbye to them at the gate, and they would kiss us.

Dora said, "Goodbye, I know you'll be drowned. I hope you'll enjoy yourselves, I'm sure!"

Alice said, "I do think it's perfectly beastly. You might just as well have asked for me to go with you; or you might let us come and see you start."

"Men must work, and women must weep," replied Oswald with grim sadness, "and the Viking said he wouldn't have us at all unless we could get on board in a concealed manner, like stowaways. He said a lot of others would want to go too if they saw us."

We made our way to the beach, and we tried to conceal ourselves as much as possible, but several people did see us.

When we got to the boat we found she was manned by our Viking and Benenden, and a boy with red hair, and they were running her down to the beach on rollers. Of course Dicky and I lent a hand, shoving at the stern of the boat when the men said, "Yo, ho! Heave ho, my merry boys all!" It wasn't exactly that that they said, but it meant the same thing, and we heaved like anything.

It was a proud moment when her nose touched the water, and prouder still when only a small part of her stern remained on the beach and Mr. Benenden remarked—

"All aboard!"

The red boy gave a "leg up" to Dicky and me and clambered up himself. Then the two men gave the last shoves to the boat, already cradled almost entirely on the bosom of the deep, and as the very end of the keel grated off the pebbles into the water, they leaped for the gunwale and hung on it with their high sea-boots waving in the evening air.

By the time they had brought their legs on board and coiled a rope or two, we chanced to look back, and already the beach seemed quite a long way off.

We were really afloat. Our smuggling expedition was no longer a dream, but a real realness. Oswald felt almost too excited at first to be able to enjoy himself. I hope you will understand this and not think the author is trying to express, by roundabout means, that the sea did not agree with Oswald. This is not the case. He was perfectly well the whole time. It was Dicky who was not. But he said it was the smell of the cabin, and not the sea, and I am sure he thought what he said was true.

In fact, that cabin was a bit stiff altogether, and was almost the means of upsetting even Oswald.

It was about six feet square, with bunks and an oil stove, and heaps of old coats and tarpaulins and sou'-westers and things, and it smelt of tar, and fish, and paraffin-smoke, and machinery oil, and of rooms where no one ever opens the window.

Oswald just put his nose in, and that was all. He had to go down later, when some fish was cooked and eaten, but by that time he had got what they call your sea-legs; but Oswald felt more as if he had got a sea-waistcoat, rather as if he had got rid of a land-waistcoat that was too heavy and too tight.

I will not weary the reader by telling about how the nets are paid out and dragged in, or about the tumbling, shining heaps of fish that come up all alive over the side of the boat, and it tips up with their weight till you think it is going over. It was a very good catch that night, and Oswald is glad he saw it, for it was very glorious. Dicky was asleep in the cabin at the time and missed it. It was deemed best not to rouse him to fresh sufferings.

It was getting latish, and Oswald, though thrilled in every marrow, was getting rather sleepy, when old Benenden said, "There she is!"

Oswald could see nothing at first, but presently he saw a dark form on the smooth sea. It turned out to be another boat.

She crept quietly up till she was alongside ours, and then a keg was hastily hoisted from her to us.

A few words in low voices were exchanged. Oswald only heard—

"Sure you ain't give us the wrong un?"

And several people laughed hoarsely.

On first going on board Oswald and Dicky had mentioned kegs, and had been ordered to "Stow that!" so that Oswald had begun to fear that after all it was only a night's fishing, and that his glorious idea had been abandoned.

But now he saw the keg his trembling heart was reassured.

It got colder and colder. Dicky, in the cabin, was covered with several coats richly scented with fish, and Oswald was glad to accept an oilskin and sou'-wester, and to sit down on some spare nets.

Until you are out on the sea at night you can never have any idea how big the world really is. The sky looks higher up, and the stars look further off, and even if you know it is only the English Channel, yet it is just as good for feeling small on as the most trackless Atlantic or Pacific. Even the fish help to show the largeness of the world, because you think of the deep deepness of the dark sea they come up out of in such rich profusion. The hold was full of fish after the second haul.

Oswald sat leaning against the precious keg, and perhaps the bigness and quietness of everything had really rendered him unconscious. But he did not know he was asleep until the Viking man woke him up by kindly shaking him and saying—

"Here, look alive! Was ye thinking to beach her with that there precious keg of yours all above board, and crying out to be broached?"

So then Oswald roused himself, and the keg was rolled on to the fish where they lay filling the hold, and armfuls of fish thrown over it.

"Is it really only water?" asked Oswald. "There's an awfully odd smell." And indeed, in spite of the many different smells that are natural to a fishing-boat, Oswald began to notice a strong scent of railway refreshment-rooms.

"In course it's only water," said the Viking. "What else would it be likely to be?" and Oswald thinks he winked in the dark.

Perhaps Oswald fell asleep again after this. It was either that or deep thought. Any way, he was aroused from it by a bump, and a soft grating sound, and he thought at first the boat was being wrecked on a coral reef or something.

But almost directly he knew that the boat had merely come ashore in the proper manner, so he jumped up.

You cannot push a boat out of the water like you push it in. It has to be hauled up by a capstan. If you don't know what that is the author is unable to explain, but there is a picture of one.

When the boat was hauled up we got out, and it was very odd to stretch your legs on land again. It felt shakier than being on sea. The red-haired boy went off to get a cart to take the shining fish to market, and Oswald decided to face the mixed-up smells of that cabin and wake Dicky.

Dicky was not grateful to Oswald for his thoughtful kindness in letting him sleep through the perils of the deep and his own uncomfortableness.

He said, "I do think you might have waked a chap. I've simply been out of everything."

Oswald did not answer back. His is a proud and self-restraining nature. He just said—

"Well, hurry up, now, and see them cart the fish away."

So we hurried up, and as Oswald came out of the cabin he heard strange voices, and his heart leaped up like the persons who "behold a rainbow in the sky," for one of the voices was the voice of that inferior and unsailorlike coastguard from Longbeach, who had gone out of his way to be disagreeable to Oswald and his brothers and sisters on at least two occasions. And now Oswald felt almost sure that his disagreeablenesses, though not exactly curses, were coming home to roost just as though they had been.

"You're missing your beauty sleep, Stokes," we heard our Viking remark.

"I'm not missing anything else, though," replied the coastguard.

"Like half a dozen mackerel for your breakfast?" inquired Mr. Benenden in kindly accents.

"I've no stomach for fish, thank you all the same," replied Mr. Stokes coldly.

He walked up and down on the beach, clapping his arms to keep himself warm.

"Going to see us unload her?" asked Mr. Benenden.

"If it's all the same to you," answered the disagreeable coastguard.

He had to wait a long time, for the cart did not come, and did not come, and kept on not coming for ages and ages. When it did the men unloaded the boat, carrying the fish by basketfuls to the cart.

Every one played up jolly well. They took the fish from the side of the hold where the keg wasn't till there was quite a deep hole there, and the other side, where the keg really was, looked like a mountain in comparison.

This could be plainly seen by the detested coastguard, and by three of his companions who had now joined him.

It was beginning to be light, not daylight, but a sort of ghost-light that you could hardly believe was the beginning of sunshine, and the sky being blue again instead of black.

The hated coastguard got impatient. He said—

"You'd best own up. It'll be the better for you. It's bound to come out, along of the fish. I know it's there. We've had private information up at the station. The game's up this time, so don't you make no mistake."

Mr. Benenden and the Viking and the boy looked at each other.

"An' what might your precious private information have been about?" asked Mr. Benenden.

"Brandy," replied the coastguard Stokes, and he went and got on to the gunwale. "And what's more, I can smell it from here."

Oswald and Dicky drew near, and the refreshment-room smell was stronger than ever. And a brown corner of the keg was peeping out.

"There you are!" cried the Loathed One. "Let's have that gentleman out, if you please, and then you'll all just come alonger me."

Remarking, with a shrug of the shoulders, that he supposed it was all up, our Viking scattered the fish that hid the barrel, and hoisted it out from its scaly bed.

"That's about the size of it," said the coastguard we did not like. "Where's the rest?"

"That's all," said Mr. Benenden. "We're poor men, and we has to act according to our means."

"We'll see the boat clear to her last timber, if you've no objections," said the Detestable One.

I could see that our gallant crew were prepared to go through with the business. More and more of the coastguards were collecting, and I understood that what the crew wanted was to go up to the coastguard station with that keg of pretending brandy, and involve the whole of the coastguards of Longbeach in one complete and perfect sell.

But Dicky was sick of the entire business. He really has not the proper soul for adventures, and what soul he has had been damped by what he had gone through.

So he said, "Look here, there's nothing in that keg but water."

Oswald could have kicked him, though he is his brother.

"Huh!" replied the Unloved One, "d'you think I haven't got a nose? Why, it's oozing out of the bunghole now as strong as Samson."

"Open it and see," said Dicky, disregarding Oswald's whispered instructions to him to shut up. "It is water."

"What do you suppose I suppose you want to get water from the other side for, you young duffer!" replied the brutal official. "There's plenty water and to spare this side."

"It's—it's French water," replied Dicky madly; "it's ours, my brother's and mine. We asked these sailors to get it for us."

"Sailors, indeed!" said the hateful coastguard. "You come along with me."

And our Viking said he was something or othered. But Benenden whispered to him in a low voice that it was all right—time was up. No one heard this but me and the Viking.

"I want to go home," said Dicky. "I don't want to come along with you."

"What did you want water for?" was asked. "To try it?"

"To stand you a drink next time you ordered us off your beastly boat," said Dicky. And Oswald rejoiced to hear the roar of laughter that responded to this fortunate piece of cheek.

I suppose Dicky's face was so angel-like, innocent-looking, like stowaways in books, that they had to believe him. Oswald told him so afterwards, and Dicky hit out.

Any way, the keg was broached, and sure enough it was water, and sea-water at that, as the Unamiable One said when he had tasted it out of a tin cup, for nothing else would convince him. "But I smell brandy still," he said, wiping his mouth after the sea-water.

Our Viking slowly drew a good-sized flat labelled bottle out of the front of his jersey.

"From the 'Old Ship,'" he said gently. "I may have spilt a drop or two here or there over the keg, my hand not being very steady, as is well known, owing to spells of marsh fever as comes over me every six weeks to the day."

The coastguard that we never could bear said, "Marsh fever be something or othered," and his comrades said the same. But they all blamed him, and we were glad.

We went home sleepy, but rejoicing. The whole thing was as complete a sell as ever I wish to see.



Of course we told our own dear and respected Lymchurch coastguards, and I think they may be trusted not to let it down on the Longbeach coastguards for many a good day. If their memories get bad I think there will always be plenty of people along that coast to remind them!

So that's all right.

* * * * *

When we had told the girls all, and borne their reproaches for not telling them before, we decided to give the Viking five bob for the game way he had played up.

So we did. He would not take it at first, but when we said, "Do—you might buy a pig with it, and call it Stokes after that coastguard," he could no longer resist, and accepted our friendly gift.

We talked with him for a bit, and when we were going we thanked him for being so jolly, and helping us to plant out the repulsive coastguard so thoroughly.

Then he said, "Don't mention it. Did you tell your little gells what you was up to?"

"No," said Oswald, "not till afterwards."

"Then you can hold your tongues. Well, since you've acted so handsome about that there pig, what's to be named for Stokes, I don't mind if I tells you something. Only mum's the word."

We said we were quite sure it was.

"Well, then," said he, leaning over the pig-stye wall, and rubbing the spotted pig's back with his stick. "It's an ill wind that blows no good to nobody. You see, that night there was a little bird went an' whispered to 'em up at Longbeach about our little bit of a keg. So when we landed they was there."

"Of course," said Oswald.

"Well, if they was there they couldn't be somewheres else, could they?"

We owned they could not.

"I shouldn't wonder," he went on, "but what a bit of a cargo was run that night further up the beach: something as wasn't sea-water. I don't say it was so, mind—and mind you don't go for to say it."

Then we understood that there is a little smuggling done still, and that we had helped in it, though quite without knowing.

We were jolly glad. Afterwards, when we had had that talk with Father, when he told us that the laws are made by the English people, and it is dishonourable for an Englishman not to stick to them, we saw that smuggling must be wrong.

But we have never been able to feel really sorry. I do not know why this is.



ZAIDA, THE MYSTERIOUS PROPHETESS OF THE GOLDEN ORIENT

THIS is the story of how we were gipsies and wandering minstrels. And, like everything else we did about that time, it was done to make money for Miss Sandal, whose poorness kept on, making our kind hearts ache.

It is rather difficult to get up any good game in a house like Miss Sandal's, where there is nothing lying about, except your own things, and where everything is so neat and necessary. Your own clothes are seldom interesting, and even if you change hats with your sisters it is not a complete disguise.

The idea of being gipsies was due to Alice. She had not at all liked being entirely out of the smuggling affray, though Oswald explained to her that it was her own fault for having been born a girl. And, of course, after the event, Dicky and I had some things to talk about that the girls hadn't, and we had a couple of wet days.

You have no idea how dull you can be in a house like that, unless you happen to know the sort of house I mean. A house that is meant for plain living and high thinking, like Miss Sandal told us, may be very nice for the high thinkers, but if you are not accustomed to thinking high there is only the plain living left, and it is like boiled rice for every meal to any young mind, however much beef and Yorkshire there may be for the young insides. Mrs. Beale saw to our having plenty of nice things to eat, but, alas! it is not always dinner-time, and in between meals the cold rice-pudding feeling is very chilling. Of course we had the splendid drawings of winged things made by our Flying Lodger, but you cannot look at pictures all day long, however many coloured chalks they are drawn with, and however fond you may be of them.

Miss Sandal's was the kind of house that makes you wander all round it and say, "What shall we do next?" And when it rains the little ones get cross.

It was the second wet day when we were wandering round the house to the sad music of our boots on the clean, bare boards that Alice said—

"Mrs. Beale has got a book at her house called 'Napoleon's book of Fate.' You might ask her to let you go and get it, Oswald. She likes you best."

Oswald is as modest as any one I know, but the truth is the truth.

"We could tell our fortunes, and read the dark future," Alice went on. "It would be better than high thinking without anything particular to think about."

So Oswald went down to Mrs. Beale and said—

"I say, Bealie dear, you've got a book up at your place. I wish you'd lend it to us to read."

"If it's the Holy Book you mean, sir," replied Mrs. Beale, going on with peeling the potatoes that were to be a radiant vision later on, all brown and crisp in company with a leg of mutton—"if it's the Holy Book you want there's one up on Miss Sandal's chest of drawerses."

"I know," said Oswald. He knew every book in the house. The backs of them were beautiful—leather and gold—but inside they were like whited sepulchres, full of poetry and improving reading. "No—we didn't want that book just now. It is a book called 'Napoleon's book of Fate.' Would you mind if I ran up to your place and got it?"