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stockings off, and we tried to see if the sheet would drag the bottom of the moat, which is shallow at that end. But it would keep floating on the top of the water, and when we tried sewing stones intoone end of it, it stuck on something in the bottom, and when we got it up it was torn. We were very sorry, and the sheet was in an awful mess; but the girls said they were sure they could wash it in the basin in their room, and we thought as we had torn it anyway, we might as well go on. That washing never came off.
    ‘No human being,’ Noel said, ‘knows half the treasures hidden in this dark tarn.’
    And we decided we would drag a bit more at that end, and work gradually round to under the dairy window where the milk pan was. We could not see that part very well, because of the bushes that grow between the cracks of the stones where the house goes down into the moat. And opposite the dairy window the barn goes straight down into the moat too. It is like pictures of Venice; but you cannot get opposite the dairy window anyhow.
    We got the sheet down again when we had tied the torn parts together in a bunch with string, and Oswald was just saying –
    ‘Now then, my hearties, pull together, pull with a will! One, two, three,’ when suddenly Dora dropped her bit of the sheet with a piercing shriek and cried out –
    ‘Oh! It’s all wormy at the bottom. I felt them wriggle.’ And she was out of the water almost before the words were out of her mouth.
    The other girls all scuttled out too, and they let the sheet go in such a hurry that we had no time to steady ourselves, and one of us went right in, and the rest got wet up to our waistbands. The one who went right in was only H.O.; but Dora made an awful fuss and said itwas our fault. We told her what we thought, and it ended in the girls going in with H.O. to change his things. We had some more gooseberries while they were gone. Dora was in an awful wax when she went away, but she is not of a sullen disposition though sometimes hasty, and when they all came back we saw it was all right, so we said –
    ‘What shall we do now?’
    Alice said, ‘I don’t think we need drag any more. It is wormy. I felt it when Dora did. And besides, the milk pan is sticking a bit of itself out of the water. I saw it through the dairy window.’
    ‘Couldn’t we get it up with fish-hooks?’ Noel said. But Alice explained that the dairy was now locked up and the key taken out. So then Oswald said –
    ‘Look here, we’ll make a raft. We should have to do it some time, and we might as well do it now. I saw an old door in that corner stable that they don’t use. You know. The one where they chop the wood.’
    We got the door.
    We had never made a raft, any of us, but the way to make rafts is better described in books, so we knew what to do.
    We found some nice little tubs stuck up on the fence of the farm garden, and nobody seemed to want them for anything just then, so we took them. Denny had a box of tools someone had given him for his last birthday; they were rather rotten little things, but the gimlet worked all right, so we managed to make holes in the edges of the tubs and fasten them with string under the four corners of the old door. This took us along time. Albert’s uncle asked us at dinner what we had been playing at, and we said it was a secret, and it was nothing wrong. You see we wished to atone for Dicky’s mistake before anything more was said. The house has no windows in the side that faces the orchard.
    The rays of the afternoon sun were beaming along the orchard grass when at last we launched the raft. She floated out beyond reach with the last shove of the launching. But Oswald waded out and towed her back; he is not afraid of worms. Yet if he had known of the other things that were in the bottom of that moat he would have kept his boots on. So would the others, especially Dora, as you will see.
    At last the gallant craft rode upon the waves. We manned her, though