ut now I've got this stuff we can begin to be
coiners right away. I believe it isn't really a crime unless you try to
buy things with the base coin.'

So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding
in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but
us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.

We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty
nettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door.
Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace,
as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswald
never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do
have. _De gustibus_ something or other, which means, one man's meat is
another man's poison.

When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed
very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in
coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.

'We ought to make it _look_ like coining, anyway,' said Oswald.

'Coiners have furnaces,' said Dicky.

Alice said: 'Wouldn't a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one on
the scullery shelf.'

We thought it would.

Then Noel reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went and
bought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings.
In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so he
bought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When he
came back he noticed the coal-scuttle we had always felt so friendly to,
and he filled it with water and brought it up. It did not leak worth
mentioning.

'We ought to have a bench,' said Dicky; 'most trades have
that--shoemakers and watchmakers, and tailors and lawyers.'

This was difficult, but we did it. There were some planks in the cellar,
and a tub and a beer-barrel. Unluckily, the tub and the beer-barrel were
not the same height, but we taught them better by getting old nurse's
'Pilgrim's Progress' and the _Wesleyan Magazine_, to put on top of the
tub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boards
across, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.

Dicky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had bought
the bottles with his own money. But Alice held them for him to do,
because girls are inferior beings, except when you are ill, and you must
be kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawba