great dark lumpish thing showed over to the right.

"There's the house," said Mother. "I wonder why she's shut the
shutters."

"Who's SHE?" asked Roberta.

"The woman I engaged to clean the place, and put the furniture straight
and get supper."

There was a low wall, and trees inside.

"That's the garden," said Mother.

"It looks more like a dripping-pan full of black cabbages," said Peter.

The cart went on along by the garden wall, and round to the back of the
house, and here it clattered into a cobble-stoned yard and stopped at
the back door.

There was no light in any of the windows.

Everyone hammered at the door, but no one came.

The man who drove the cart said he expected Mrs. Viney had gone home.

"You see your train was that late," said he.

"But she's got the key," said Mother. "What are we to do?"

"Oh, she'll have left that under the doorstep," said the cart man;
"folks do hereabouts." He took the lantern off his cart and stooped.

"Ay, here it is, right enough," he said.

He unlocked the door and went in and set his lantern on the table.

"Got e'er a candle?" said he.

"I don't know where anything is." Mother spoke rather less cheerfully
than usual.

He struck a match. There was a candle on the table, and he lighted it.
By its thin little glimmer the children saw a large bare kitchen with
a stone floor. There were no curtains, no hearth-rug. The kitchen
table from home stood in the middle of the room. The chairs were in one
corner, and the pots, pans, brooms, and crockery in another. There was
no fire, and the black grate showed cold, dead ashes.

As the cart man turned to go out after he had brought in the boxes,
there was a rustling, scampering sound that seemed to come from inside
the walls of the house.

"Oh, what's that?" cried the girls.

"It's only the rats," said the cart man. And he went away and shut the
door, and the sudden draught of it blew out the candle.

"Oh, dear," said Phyllis, "I wish we hadn't come!" and she knocked a
chair over.

"ONLY the rats!" said Peter, in the dark.

Chapter II. Peter's coal-mine.

"What fun!" said Mother, in the dark, feeling for the matches on the
table. "How frightened the poor mice were--I don't believe they were
rats at all."

She struck a match and relighted the candle and everyone looked at each
other by its winky, blinky light.

"Well," she said, "you've often wanted something to happen and now it
has. This is qui