of these stealthy rodents. The back-door
was locked, but we climbed up on the water-butt and looked through a
little window, and saw a plate-rack, and a sink with taps, and a copper,
and a broken coal-scuttle. It was very exciting.

The day after we went again, and this time we borrowed the next-door
people's clothes-line, and by tying it in loops made a sort of
rope-ladder, and then all of us got over. We had a glorious game
besieging the pigsty, and all the military orders had to be given in
whispers for fear of us being turned out if anyone passed and heard us.
We found the pinewood, and the field, and the house had all got boards
to say what would be done to trespassers with the utmost rigour of the
law. It was such a swat untying the knots in the next-door people's
clothes-line, that we only undid one; and then we bought them a new line
with our own pocket-money, and kept the rope-ladder in a hidden bed of
nettles, always on the spot and ready for us.

We found a way of going round, and getting to the house through a hole
in a hedge and across a lane, so as not to go across the big fields
where every human eye could mark our proceedings, and come after us and
tell us not to.

We went there every day. It would have been a terrible thing if an army
of bloodthirsty Saracens had chosen that way to march on London, for
there was hardly ever a look-out in the tower now.

It was a jolly place to play in, and Oswald had found out what 'in
Chancery' really means, so he had no fear of being turned into a
pig-headed lady, or marble from the waist down.

And after a bit we began to want to get into the house, and we wanted it
so much that our hearts got quite cold about the chicken-house and the
pigsty, which at first had been a fairy dream of delight.

But the doors were all locked. We got all the old keys we could, but
they were all the keys of desks and workboxes and tea-caddies, and not
the right size or shape for doors.

Then one day Oswald, with his justly celebrated observingness, noticed
that one of the bars was loose in the brickwork of a sort of
half-underground window. To pull it out was to the lion-hearted youth
but the work of a moment. He got down through the gap thus obtained, and
found himself in a place like a very small area, only with no steps, and
with bars above him, broken glass and matted rags and straw beneath his
enterprising boots, and on one side a small cobwebby window. He got out
again and