was clutching Dicky by the collar.

"Blime if I don't chuck ye in the river, the whole bloomin' lot of you!"
he exclaimed.

The girls screamed, the boys shouted, and though Oswald threw himself on
the insulter of his sister with all his manly vigour, yet but for a
friend of Oswald's, who is in the police, passing at that instant, the
author shudders to think what might have happened, for he was a strong
young man, and Oswald is not yet come to his full strength, and the
Quaggy runs all too near.

Our policeman led our assailant aside, and we waited anxiously, as he
told us to. After long uncertain moments the young man in the comforter
loafed off grumbling, and our policeman turned to us.

"Said you give him a dollop o' pudding, and it tasted of soap and
hair-oil."

I suppose the hair-oil must have been the Brown Windsoriness of the soap
coming out. We were sorry, but it was still our duty to get rid of the
pudding. The Quaggy was handy, it is true, but when you have collected
money to feed poor children and spent it on pudding it is not right to
throw that pudding in the river. People do not subscribe shillings and
sixpences and half-crowns to feed a hungry flood with Christmas pudding.

Yet we shrank from asking any more people whether they were poor
persons, or about their families, and still more from offering the
pudding to chance people who might bite into it and taste the soap
before we had time to get away.

It was Alice, the most paralysed with disgrace of all of us, who thought
of the best idea.

She said, "Let's take it to the workhouse. At any rate they're all poor
people there, and they mayn't go out without leave, so they can't run
after us to do anything to us after the pudding. No one would give them
leave to go out to pursue people who had brought them pudding, and wreck
vengeance on them, and at any rate we shall get rid of the
conscience-pudding--it's a sort of conscience-money, you know--only it
isn't money but pudding."

The workhouse is a good way, but we stuck to it, though very cold, and
hungrier than we thought possible when we started, for we had been so
agitated we had not even stayed to eat the plain pudding our good Father
had so kindly and thoughtfully ordered for our Christmas dinner.

The big bell at the workhouse made a man open the door to us, when we
rang it. Oswald said (and he spoke because he is next eldest to Dora,
and she had had jolly well enough of saying anything ab