st have done _something_ to
deserve a find like this.'

'Don't worry,' said Oswald. 'Albert's uncle says you always have to pay
for everything. We haven't paid for this yet.'

This reflection, like so many of our young hero's, was correct.

I have not yet told you about the finest find of all the fine finds we
found finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it is
allity-what's-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether other
authors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was on
the top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a very
odd shape. You went along a passage to the door, and then there was the
room; but the room went back along the same way as the passage had come,
so that when you went round there no one could see you from the door.
The door was sort of in the middle of the room; but I see I must draw it
for you, or you will never understand.

[Illustration]

The door that is marked 'Another Door' was full of agitated excitement
for us, because it wasn't a door at all--at least, not the kind that you
are used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairs
in the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfway
up, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room through
the bars.

'Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here,' said Dicky.

'Or bears,' said H. O.

'Or enchanceried Princes,' said Noel.

'It seems silly, though,' said Alice, 'because the lunatic or the bear
or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard
the keepers coming, if he didn't happen to want to show off just then.'

This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was
never untwisted.

'Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,' said Alice, 'and they did
not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his
bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those
awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.'

It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch
labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.

'Let's have a regular round of gaieties,' said Oswald. 'Each of us to
take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the
others look through the bars.'

So next day we did this.

Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of
Mrs. S., but Noel and H. O. screamed, and would not