cks
to every ambition.

She let Noel hold them part of the time.

When she was not helping Dicky, she tried covering pennies with the
silver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success that
would take anyone in.

H. O. and Noel took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it was
dull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minutes
he cried, 'Hist! someone approaches!' and the coining materials were
hastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreed
we would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.

Of course, there wasn't anyone really. After this the kids wanted to be
sentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.

It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house that
made whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. I
felt quite unhappy, and when Dicky was the unfortunate monarch who
perished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn't half
like it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew the
knife was only the little sliding-door of the chicken-house.

We played coiners for several days, and all learned to give the alarm,
but we were beginning to feel it was time for something new. Noel was
saving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehair
sofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswald
had bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastille
prisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when the
great event occurred.

We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours had
elapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets were
always full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take it
out in handfuls and let people see it--not too near.

Then came the great eventful day.

H. O. had fallen into the water-butt that morning. We dried his holland
smock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, and
thus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him to
bed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gang
of coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all our
false money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece of
trimming, for dolls, that was all over little imitation silver coins,
called sequences, I believe, to imitate the coinage of Turkish regions.
We reached our Enchanceried House, got in as