n't all have exactly the same blessings,
but he didn't seem to see it.

"It doesn't seem like the way things happen in books," he said, "In
Walter Scott it wouldn't be like that, nor yet in Anthony Hope. I should
think the rule would be the redder the cellarier. If I was putting it
into poetry I should make our cellars have something much wonderfuller
in them than just wooden things. H.O., if you don't shut up I'll never
let you be in anything again."

"There's that door you go down steps to," said Dicky; "we've never been
in there. If Dora and I weren't going with Miss Blake to be fitted for
boots we might try that."

"That's just what I was coming to. (Stow it, H.O.!) I felt just like
cellars to-day, while you other chaps were washing your hands for
din.--and it was very cold; but I made H.O. feel the same, and we went
down, and--that door _isn't shut now_."

The intelligible reader may easily guess that we finished our dinner as
quickly as we could, and we put on our outers, sympathising with Dicky
and Dora, who, owing to boots, were out of it, and we went into the
garden. There are five steps down to that door. They were red brick when
they began, but now they are green with age and mysteriousness and not
being walked on. And at the bottom of them the door was, as Noel said,
not fastened. We went in.

"It isn't beery, winey cellars at all," Alice said; "it's more like a
robber's store-house. Look there."

We had got to the inner cellar, and there were heaps of carrots and
other vegetables.

"Halt, my men!" cried Oswald, "advance not an inch further! The bandits
may lurk not a yard from you!"

"Suppose they jump out on us?" said H.O.

"They will not rashly leap into the light," said the discerning Oswald.
And he went to fetch a new dark-lantern of his that he had not had any
chance of really using before. But some one had taken Oswald's secret
matches, and then the beastly lantern wouldn't light for ever so long.
But he thought it didn't matter his being rather a long time gone,
because the others could pass the time in wondering whether anything
would jump out on them, and if so, what and when.

So when he got back to the red steps and the open door and flashed his
glorious bull's-eye round it was rather an annoying thing for there not
to be a single other eye for it to flash into. Every one had vanished.

"Hallo!" cried Oswald, and if his gallant voice trembled he is not
ashamed of it, because he know