because he was
hungry. How do you know what _you'd_ do if you were hungry enough?'

'I shouldn't steal,' said Dora.

'I'm not so sure,' said Dicky; and they argued about it all the way
home, and before we got in it began to rain in torrents.

Conversations about food always make you feel as though it was a very
long time since you had had anything to eat. Mrs. Beale had gone home,
of course, but we went into the larder. It is a generous larder. No
lock, only a big wooden latch that pulls up with a string, like in Red
Riding Hood. And the floor is clean damp red brick. It makes ginger-nuts
soft if you put the bag on this floor. There was half a rhubarb pie, and
there were meat turnovers with potato in them. Mrs. Beale is a
thoughtful person, and I know many people much richer that are not
nearly so thoughtful.

We had a comfortable feast at the kitchen table, standing up to eat,
like horses.

Then we had to let Noel read us his piece of poetry about the soldier;
he wouldn't have slept if we hadn't. It was very long, and it began as
I have said, and ended up:

'Poor soldiers, learn a lesson from to-day,
It is very wrong to run away;
It is better to stay
And serve your King and Country--hurray!'

Noel owned that Hooray sounded too cheerful for the end of a poem about
soldiers with faces like theirs were.

'But I didn't mean it about the soldiers. It was about the King and
Country. Half a sec. I'll put that in.' So he wrote:

'P.S.--I do not mean to be unkind,
Poor soldiers, to you, so never mind.
When I say hurray or sing,
It is because I am thinking of my Country and my King.'

'You can't sing Hooray,' said Dicky. So Noel went to bed singing it,
which was better than arguing about it, Alice said. But it was noisier
as well.

Oswald and Dicky always went round the house to see that all the doors
were bolted and the shutters up. This is what the head of the house
always does, and Oswald is the head when father is not there. There are
no shutters upstairs, only curtains. The White House, which is Miss
Sandal's house's name, is not in the village, but 'quite a step' from
it, as Mrs. Beale says. It is the first house you come to as you come
along the road from the marsh.

We used to look in the cupboard and under the beds for burglars every
night. The girls liked us to, though they wouldn't look themselves, and
I don't know that it was much good. If there _is_ a burglar, it's
sometimes safer