p slides on the
attic-landing to the fairy palace which I constructed in the lumber-room
out of old lace curtains hung over towel-rails, or the ogre's den in the
housemaid's cupboard under the stairs.

I remember well how, one afternoon, when Blair for a wonder was absent,
I seized the golden opportunity to organize a grand game of carnival.
The children's pocket-handkerchiefs and silk neckties were collected
from the various drawers and hung up as flags on a string fastened from
the gas-bracket to the window. All my little cousins were eager to be
masquers, and I racked my brains to devise costumes for them out of the
very limited materials at my command.

Lucy, in her night-dress, with two sheets of copy-book paper fastened on
to her shoulders as wings, made quite a creditable angel. Edgar was an
Indian, his face painted in stripes of red and yellow, some feathers
plucked from the dusting-broom stuck in his curly locks, and the
hearth-brush for a tomahawk. Mary, with my best sash draped artistically
over her right shoulder, represented Venus, with Cuthbert for a Cupid;
Donald, in Aunt Agatha's furs, stolen shamelessly from her bedroom,
rollicked about as a savage; and, as I really had no clothes left for
Dorothy, I blacked her face with a piece of coal, and transformed her
into a little negro child. I myself was Father Neptune, with a
toasting-fork for a trident, and as we paraded round the nursery,
pelting each other with pieces of torn-up paper for confetti, I think we
rivalled in noise the wildest carnival I had ever witnessed at San
Carlos.

We were in the very height of our excitement, and were scrambling
eagerly for pretended bon-bons, which Lucy was flinging from an
imaginary balcony, when the door was suddenly opened, and Aunt Agatha
entered, ushering in a visitor.

"This is my little flock, Mrs. Winstanley--" she began, then stopped
short in utter dismay at the scene of confusion before her.

My aunt's sense of humour was not keen; her orderly nursery and tidy
family were her pride, and the sight of the tumbled heads and crumpled
pinafores, the clothes strewn hither and thither, and the painted and
blackened faces of her ordinarily well-behaved darlings was enough to
justify her look of extreme annoyance. She turned at once upon the true
offender.

"Philippa, what have you been doing with the children?" she asked
sharply.

No culprit caught red-handed could have felt more guilty or discomfited
than