enough. You must BE good. And
we've hardly done anything. The Golden Deed book's almost empty.'

'Couldn't we have a book of leaden deeds?' said Noel, coming out of his
poetry, 'then there'd be plenty for Alice to write about if she wants
to, or brass or zinc or aluminium deeds? We shan't ever fill the book
with golden ones.'

H. O. had rolled himself in the red tablecloth and said Noel was only
advising us to be naughty, and again peace waved in the balance. But
Alice said, 'Oh, H. O., DON'T--he didn't mean that; but really and
truly, I wish wrong things weren't so interesting. You begin to do a
noble act, and then it gets so exciting, and before you know where you
are you are doing something wrong as hard as you can lick.'

'And enjoying it too' Dick said.

'It's very curious,' Denny said, 'but you don't seem to be able to be
certain inside yourself whether what you're doing is right if you happen
to like doing it, but if you don't like doing it you know quite well. I
only thought of that just now. I wish Noel would make a poem about it.'

'I am,' Noel said; 'it began about a crocodile but it is finishing
itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a
minute.'

He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little
friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:

'The crocodile is very wise, He lives in the Nile with little eyes, He
eats the hippopotamus too, And if he could he would eat up you.

'The lovely woods and starry skies He looks upon with glad surprise! He
sees the riches of the east, And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.

'So let all be good and beware Of saying shan't and won't and don't
care; For doing wrong is easier far Than any of the right things I know
about are.

And I couldn't make it king of beasts because of it not rhyming with
east, so I put the s off beasts on to king. It comes even in the end.'

We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noel gets really ill if
you don't like what he writes, and then he said, 'If it's trying that's
wanted, I don't care how hard we TRY to be good, but we may as well
do it some nice way. Let's be Pilgrim's Progress, like I wanted to at
first.'

And we were all beginning to say we didn't want to, when suddenly Dora
said, 'Oh, look here! I know. We'll be the Canterbury Pilgrims. People
used to go pilgrimages to make themselves good.'

'With peas in their shoes,' the Dentist said. 'It's in a