bbons and things, but we stood in anxious gloom, for now
H.O. was indeed lost. The dress-basket might be on its way to Liverpool,
or rocking on the Channel, and H.O. might never be found again. Oswald
did not say these things. It is best to hold your jaw when you want to
see a thing out, and are liable to be sent to bed at a strange hotel if
any one happens to remember you.

Then suddenly the station master came with a telegram.

It said: "A dress-basket without label at Cannon Street detained for
identification suspicious sounds from inside detain inquirers dynamite
machine suspected."

He did not show us this till my Father had told him about H.O., which it
took some time for him to believe, and then he did and laughed, and said
he would wire them to get the dynamite machine to speak, and if so, to
take it out and keep it till its Father called for it.

So back we went to London, with hearts a little lighter, but not gay,
for we were a very long time from the last things we had had to eat. And
Oswald was almost sorry he had not taken those crystallised fruits.

It was quite late when we got to Cannon Street, and we went straight
into the cloakroom, and there was the man in charge, a very jolly chap,
sitting on a stool. And there was H.O., the guilty stowaway, dressed in
a red-and-white clown's dress, very dusty, and his face as dirty as I
have ever seen it, sitting on some one else's tin box, with his feet on
some body else's portmanteau, eating bread and cheese, and drinking ale
out of a can.

My Father claimed him at once, and Oswald identified the basket. It was
very large. There was a tray on the top with hats in it, and H.O. had
this on top of him. We all went to bed in Cannon Street Hotel. My Father
said nothing to H.O. that night. When we were in bed I tried to get H.O.
to tell me all about it, but he was too sleepy and cross. It was the
beer and the knocking about in the basket, I suppose. Next day we went
back to the Moat House, where the raving anxiousness of the others had
been cooled the night before by a telegram from Dover.

My Father said he would speak to H.O. in the evening. It is very horrid
not to be spoken to at once and get it over. But H.O. certainly deserved
something.

It is hard to tell this tale, because so much of it happened all at once
but at different places. But this is what H.O. said to us about it. He
said--

"Don't bother--let me alone."

But we were all kind and gentle, a