essons to do, and we were thus free to attend to any adventures
which came along. Adventures are the real business of life. The rest is
only in-betweenness--what Albert's uncle calls padding. He is an author.

Miss Sandal's house was very plain and clean, with lots of white paint,
and very difficult to play in. So we were out a good deal. It was
seaside, so, of course, there was the beach, and besides that the
marsh--big green fields with sheep all about, and wet dykes with sedge
growing, and mud, and eels in the mud, and winding white roads that all
look the same, and all very interesting, as though they might lead to
almost anything that you didn't expect. Really, of course, they lead to
Ashford and Romney and Ivychurch, and real live places like that. But
they don't look it.

The day when what I am going to tell you about happened, we were all
leaning on the stone wall looking at the pigs. The pigman is a great
friend of ours--all except H. O., who is my youngest brother. His name
is Horace Octavius, and if you want to know why we called him H. O. you
had better read 'The Treasure Seekers' and find out. He had gone to tea
with the schoolmaster's son--a hateful kid.

'Isn't that the boy you're always fighting?' Dora asked when H. O. said
he was going.

'Yes,' said H. O., 'but, then, he keeps rabbits.'

So then we understood and let him go.

Well, the rest of us were gazing fondly on the pigs, and two soldiers
came by.

We asked them where they were off to.

They told us to mind our own business, which is not manners, even if you
are a soldier on private affairs.

'Oh, all right,' said Oswald, who is the eldest. And he advised the
soldiers to keep their hair on. The little they had was cut very short.

'I expect they're scouts or something,' said Dicky; 'it's a field-day,
or a sham-fight, or something, as likely as not.'

'Let's go after them and see,' said Oswald, ever prompt in his
decidings. So we did.

We ran a bit at first, so as not to let the soldiers have too much of a
lead. Their red coats made it quite easy to keep them in sight on the
winding white marsh road. But we did not catch them up: they seemed to
go faster and faster. So we ran a little bit more every now and then,
and we went quite a long way after them. But they didn't meet any of
their officers or regiments or things, and we began to think that
perchance we were engaged in the disheartening chase of the wild goose.
This has sometime