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shall avenge it.’
    So we knew he wanted to be quiet, and the girls decided that we ought to play out of doors so as not to disturb him; we should have played out of doors anyhow on a jolly fine day like that.
    But as we were going out Dicky said to Oswald –
    ‘I say, come along here a minute, will you?’
    So Oswald came along, and Dicky took him into the other parlour and shut the door, and Oswald said –
    ‘Well, spit it out: what is it?’ He knows that is vulgar, and he would not have said it to anyone but his own brother. Dicky said –
    ‘It’s a pretty fair nuisance. I told you how it would be.’ And Oswald was patient with him, and said –
    ‘What is? Don’t be all day about it.’
    Dicky fidgeted about a bit, and then he said—
    ‘Well, I did as I said. I looked about for something useful to do. And you know that dairy window that wouldn’t open – only a little bit like that? Well, I mended the catch with wire and whip cord and it opened wide.’
    ‘And I suppose they didn’t want it mended,’ said Oswald. He knew but too well that grown-up people sometimes like to keep things far different from what we would, and you catch it if you try to do otherwise.
    ‘I shouldn’t have minded
that
,’ Dicky said, ‘because I could easily have taken it all off again if they’d only said so. But the sillies went and propped up a milk pan against the window. They never took the trouble to notice I had mended it. So the wretched thing pushed the window open all by itself directly they propped it up, and it tumbled through into the moat, and they are most awfully waxy. All the men are out in the fields and they haven’t any spare milk pans. If I were a farmer, I must say I wouldn’t stick at an extra milk pan or two. Accidents must happen sometimes. I call it mean.’
    Dicky spoke in savage tones. But Oswald was not so unhappy, first because it wasn’t his fault, and next because he is a far-seeing boy.
    ‘Never mind,’ he said kindly. ‘Keep your tail up. We’ll get the beastly milk pan out all right. Come on.’ He rushed hastily to the garden and gave a low, signifying whistle, which the others know well enough to mean something extra being up.
    And when they were all gathered round him he spoke.
    ‘Fellow countrymen,’ he said, ‘we’re going to have a rousing good time.’
    ‘It’s nothing naughty, is it,’ Daisy asked, ‘like the last time you had that was rousingly good?’
    Alice said ‘Shish’, and Oswald pretended not to hear.
    ‘A precious treasure,’ he said, ‘has inadvertently been laid low in the moat by one of us.’
    ‘The rotten thing tumbled in by itself,’ Dicky said.
    Oswald waved his hand and said, ‘Anyhow, it’s there. It’s our duty to restore it to its sorrowing owners. I say, look here – we’re going to drag the moat.’
    Everyone brightened up at this. It was our duty and it was interesting too. This is very uncommon.
    So we went out to where the orchard is, at the other side of the moat. There were gooseberries and things on the bushes, but we did not take any till we had asked if we might. Alice went and asked. Mrs Pettigrew said, ‘Law! I suppose so; you’d eat ’em anyhow, leave or no leave.’
    She little knows the honourable nature of the house of Bastable. But she has much to learn.
    The orchard slopes gently down to the dark waters of the moat. We sat there in the sun and talked about dragging the moat, till Denny said, ‘How
do
you drag moats?’
    And we were speechless, because, though we had read many times about a moat being dragged for missing heirs and lost wills, we really had never thought about exactly how it was done.
    ‘Grappling irons are right, I believe,’ Denny said, ‘but I don’t suppose they’d have any at the farm.’
    And we asked, and found they had never even heard of them. I think myself he meant some other word, but he was quite positive.
    So then we got a sheet off Oswald’s bed, and we all took our shoes and