worthy Mr. Sandal had climbed a scaffolding to give a workman a tract
about drink, and he didn't know the proper part of the scaffolding to
stand on (the workman did, of course) so he fetched down half a dozen
planks and the workman, and if a dust-cart hadn't happened to be passing
just under so that they fell into it their lives would not have been
spared. As it was Mr. Sandal broke his arm and his head. The workman
escaped unscathed but furious. The workman was a teetotaler.

Mrs. Beale came, and the first thing she did was to buy a leg of mutton
and cook it. It was the first meat we had had since arriving at
Lymchurch.

[Illustration: HE FETCHED DOWN HALF A DOZEN PLANKS AND THE WORKMAN.]

"I 'spect she can't afford good butcher's meat," said Mrs. Beale; "but
your pa, I expect he pays for you, and I lay he'd like you to have your
fill of something as'll lay acrost your chesties." So she made a
Yorkshire pudding as well. It was good.

After dinner we sat on the sea-wall, feeling more like after dinner than
we had felt for days, and Dora said--

"Poor Miss Sandal! I never thought about her being hard-up, somehow. I
wish we could do something to help her."

"We might go out street-singing," Noel said. But that was no good,
because there is only one street in the village, and the people there
are much too poor for one to be able to ask them for anything. And all
round it is fields with only sheep, who have nothing to give except
their wool, and when it comes to taking that, they are never asked.

Dora thought we might get Father to give her money, but Oswald knew this
would never do.

Then suddenly a thought struck some one--I will not say who--and that
some one said--

"She ought to let lodgings, like all the other people do in Lymchurch."

That was the beginning of it. The end--for that day--was our getting the
top of a cardboard box and printing on it the following lines in as
many different coloured chalks as we happened to have with us.

LODGINGS TO LET.

ENQUIRE INSIDE.

We ruled spaces for the letters to go in, and did it very neatly. When
we went to bed we stuck it in our bedroom window with stamp-paper.

In the morning when Oswald drew up his blind there was quite a crowd of
kids looking at the card. Mrs. Beale came out and shoo-ed them away as
if they were hens. And we did not have to explain the card to her at
all. She never said anything about it. I nev