re at the birds on
the telegraph wires as we came home in the train.

After tea we called a council in the straw-loft, and Oswald said--

'Denny and I have got a secret.'

'I know what it is,' Dicky said contemptibly. 'You've found out that
shop in Maidstone where peppermint rock is four ounces a penny. H. O.
and I found it out before you did.'

Oswald said, 'You shut-up. If you don't want to hear the secret you'd
better bunk. I'm going to administer the secret oath.'

This is a very solemn oath, and only used about real things, and never
for pretending ones, so Dicky said--

'Oh, all right; go ahead! I thought you were only rotting.'

So they all took the secret oath. Noel made it up long before, when he
had found the first thrush's nest we ever saw in the Blackheath garden:

'I will not tell, I will not reveal,
I will not touch, or try to steal;
And may I be called a beastly sneak,
If this great secret I ever repeat.'

It is a little wrong about the poetry, but it is a very binding promise.
They all repeated it, down to H. O.

'Now then,' Dicky said, 'what's up?'

Oswald, in proud silence, drew the pistol from his breast and held it
out, and there was a murmur of awful amazement and respect from every
one of the council. The pistol was not loaded, so we let even the girls
have it to look at. And then Dicky said, 'Let's go hunting.'

And we decided that we would. H. O. wanted to go down to the village and
get penny horns at the shop for the huntsmen to wind, like in the song,
but we thought it would be more modest not to wind horns or anything
noisy, at any rate not until we had run down our prey. But his talking
of the song made us decide that it was the fox we wanted to hunt. We had
not been particular which animal we hunted before that.

Oswald let Denny have first go with the pistol, and when we went to bed
he slept with it under his pillow, but not loaded, for fear he should
have a nightmare and draw his fell weapon before he was properly awake.

Oswald let Denny have it, because Denny had toothache, and a pistol is
consoling though it does not actually stop the pain of the tooth. The
toothache got worse, and Albert's uncle looked at it, and said it was
very loose, and Denny owned he had tried to crack a peach-stone with it.
Which accounts. He had creosote and camphor, and went to bed early, with
his tooth tied up in red flannel.

Oswald knows it is right to be very kind whe