tiny looks at
present as if it might be different.

We made two expeditions to discover the source of the Nile (or the North
Pole), and owing to their habit of sticking together and doing dull and
praiseable things, like sewing, and helping with the cooking, and taking
invalid delicacies to the poor and indignant, Daisy and Dora were wholly
out of it both times, though Dora's foot was now quite well enough to
have gone to the North Pole or the Equator either. They said they did
not mind the first time, because they like to keep themselves clean; it
is another of their queer ways. And they said they had had a better time
than us. (It was only a clergyman and his wife who called, and hot cakes
for tea.) The second time they said they were lucky not to have been in
it. And perhaps they were right. But let me to my narrating. I hope you
will like it. I am going to try to write it a different way, like the
books they give you for a prize at a girls' school--I mean a 'young
ladies' school', of course--not a high school. High schools are not
nearly so silly as some other kinds. Here goes:

'"Ah, me!" sighed a slender maiden of twelve summers, removing her
elegant hat and passing her tapery fingers lightly through her fair
tresses, "how sad it is--is it not?--to see able-bodied youths and young
ladies wasting the precious summer hours in idleness and luxury."

'The maiden frowned reproachingly, but yet with earnest gentleness, at
the group of youths and maidens who sat beneath an umbragipeaous beech
tree and ate black currants.

'"Dear brothers and sisters," the blushing girl went on, "could we not,
even now, at the eleventh hour, turn to account these wasted lives of
ours, and seek some occupation at once improving and agreeable?"

'"I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister," replied the
cleverest of her brothers, on whose brow--'

It's no use. I can't write like these books. I wonder how the books'
authors can keep it up.

What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the
orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said--

'I say, look here, let's do something. It's simply silly to waste a day
like this. It's just on eleven. Come on!'

And Oswald said, 'Where to?'

This was the beginning of it.

The moat that is all round our house is fed by streams. One of them is
a sort of open overflow pipe from a good-sized stream that flows at the
other side of the orchard.

It was this stream t