an make up its mind not to be it. There
are fields and bits of lanes and hedges, but the rows of ugly little
houses go creeping along like yellow caterpillars, eating up the green
fields. There are brickfields here and there, and cabbage fields, and
places where rhubarb is grown. And it is much more interesting than real
town, because there is more room to do things in, and not so many people
to say 'Don't!' when you do.

Nurse's house was the kind that is always a house, no matter how much
you pretend it is a baron's castle or an enchanted palace. And to play
at its being a robber's cave or any part of a pirate ship is simply
silly, and no satisfaction to anyone. There were no books except sermons
and the Wesleyan Magazine. And there was a green cut-paper fuzziness on
the frame of the looking-glass in the parlour. There was a garden--at
least, there was enough ground for one, but nothing grew there except
nettles and brick-bats and one elder-tree, and a poor old oak-tree that
had seen better days. There was a hole in the fence, very convenient for
going through in a hurry.

One morning there had been what old nurse called a 'set out' because
Noel was writing some of his world-without-end poetry, and he had got as
far as

'How beautiful the sun and moon
And all the stars appear!
They really are a long way off,
Although they look very near.'

'I do not think that they are worlds,
But apples on a tree;
The angels pick them whenever they like,
But it is not so with me.
I wish I was a little angel-child
To gather stars for my tea,'

before Dicky found out that he was writing it on the blank leaf at the
end of the Latin prize Dicky got at the Preparatory School.

Noel--for mysterious reasons unknown to Fame--is Alice's favourite
brother, and of course she stood up for him, and said he didn't mean it.

And things were said on both sides, and the rest of us agreed with Dicky
that Noel was old enough to know better. It ended in Alice and Noel
going out for a walk by themselves as soon as Noel had had the crying
washed off his hands and face.

The rest of us spent the shining hours in getting a board and nailing it
up in the oak-tree for a look-out station, in case of Saracens arriving
with an army to attack London. The oak is always hard to climb, and this
was a peculiarly hard day, because the next-door people had tied a
clothes-line to the oak, and hung their wet washing out on the l