did not get all the soap off the currants. The pudding smelt like a
washing-day when the time came to cut it open. And we washed a corner of
the table to chop the suet on. Chopping suet looks easy till you try.

Father's machine he weighs letters with did to weigh out the things. We
did this very carefully, in case the grocer had not done so. Everything
was right except the raisins. H.O. had carried them home. He was very
young then, and there was a hole in the corner of the paper bag and his
mouth was sticky.

Lots of people have been hanged to a gibbet in chains on evidence no
worse than that, and we told H.O. so till he cried. This was good for
him. It was not unkindness to H.O., but part of our duty.

Chopping suet as fine as possible is much harder than any one would
think, as I said before. So is crumbling bread--especially if your loaf
is new, like ours was. When we had done them the breadcrumbs and the
suet were both very large and lumpy, and of a dingy gray colour,
something like pale slate pencil.

They looked a better colour when we had mixed them with the flour. The
girls had washed the currants with Brown Windsor soap and the sponge.
Some of the currants got inside the sponge and kept coming out in the
bath for days afterwards. I see now that this was not quite nice. We cut
the candied peel as thin as we wish people would cut our
bread-and-butter. We tried to take the stones out of the raisins, but
they were too sticky, so we just divided them up in seven lots. Then we
mixed the other things in the wash-hand basin from the spare bedroom
that was always spare. We each put in our own lot of raisins and turned
it all into a pudding-basin, and tied it up in one of Alice's pinafores,
which was the nearest thing to a proper pudding-cloth we could find--at
any rate clean. What was left sticking to the wash-hand basin did not
taste so bad.

"It's a little bit soapy," Alice said, "but perhaps that will boil out;
like stains in table-cloths."

It was a difficult question how to boil the pudding. Matilda proved
furious when asked to let us, just because some one had happened to
knock her hat off the scullery door and Pincher had got it and done for
it. However, part of the embassy nicked a saucepan while the others were
being told what Matilda thought about the hat, and we got hot water out
of the bath-room and made it boil over our nursery fire. We put the
pudding in--it was now getting on towards the hour of