drat him! where's that Honeysett?'

So then Oswald felt it was the time to be a general, like he always
meant to if he got the chance. He said, 'Come on!' and he took a stone
and broke the kitchen window, and put his hand through the jagged hole
and unfastened the catch, and climbed in. The back-door was locked and
the key gone, but the front-door was only bolted inside. But it stuck
very tight, from having been painted and shut before the paint was dry,
and never opened again.

Oswald couldn't open it. He ran back to the kitchen window and shouted
to the others.

'Go round to the other door and shove for all you're worth!' he cried in
the manly tones that all must obey.

So they went; but Dicky told me afterwards that the woman didn't shove
for anything like all she was worth. In fact, she wouldn't shove at all,
till he had to make a sort of battering-ram of her, and then she seemed
to awake from a dream, and they got the door open.

We followed the woman up the stairs and into a bedroom, and there was
another woman sitting up in bed trembling, and her mouth opening and
shutting.

'Oh, it's you, Eliza,' she said, falling back against the pillows. 'I
thought it were tramps.'

Eliza did not break things to the sufferer gently, like we should have
done, however hurried.

'Mercy you aren't burnt alive in your bed, Lily!' she merely remarked.
'The place is all ablaze!'

Then she rolled her sick sufferer in a blanket and took hold of her
shoulders, and told us to take her feet.

But Oswald was too calm to do this suddenly. He said:

'Where are you going to put her?'

'Anywheres!' said Eliza wildly--'anywheres is better than this here.'

'There's plenty of time,' said Oswald; and he and Dicky rushed into
another room, and got a feather-bed and bedclothes, and hunched them
down the stairs, and dragged them half a field away, and made a bed in a
nice dry ditch. And then we consented to carry the unfortunate bed-woman
to it.

The house was full of smoke by this time, though it hadn't yet caught
fire; and I tell you we felt just like heroic firemen as we stumbled
down the crookety narrow stairs, back first, bearing the feet of the
sick woman. Oswald did so wish he had had a fireman's helmet to put on!

When we got the fading Lily to her dry ditch, she clutched Oswald's arm
and whispered:

'Save the sticks!'

'What sticks?' asked Oswald, who thought it was the ragings of delirium.

'She means the furniture,