ny, when it's children. That sentence
looks wrong somehow. I mean they don't mind six pairs of boots, or six
pounds of apples, or six oranges, especially in equations, but they
seem to think you ought not to have five brothers and sisters. Of course
Dicky was to go, because it was his idea. Dora had to go to Blackheath
to see an old lady, a friend of Father's, so she couldn't go. Alice
said _she_ ought to go, because it said, 'Ladies _and_ gentlemen,' and
perhaps the G. B. wouldn't let us have the money unless there were both
kinds of us.

H. O. said Alice wasn't a lady; and she said _he_ wasn't going, anyway.
Then he called her a disagreeable cat, and she began to cry.

But Oswald always tries to make up quarrels, so he said--

'You're little sillies, both of you!'

And Dora said, 'Don't cry, Alice; he only meant you weren't a grown-up
lady.'

Then H. O. said, 'What else did you think I meant, Disagreeable?'

So Dicky said, 'Don't be disagreeable yourself, H. O. Let her alone and
say you're sorry, or I'll jolly well make you!'

So H. O. said he was sorry. Then Alice kissed him and said she was sorry
too; and after that H. O. gave her a hug, and said, 'Now I'm _really and
truly_ sorry,' So it was all right.

Noel went the last time any of us went to London, so he was out of it,
and Dora said she would take him to Blackheath if we'd take H. O. So as
there'd been a little disagreeableness we thought it was better to take
him, and we did. At first we thought we'd tear our oldest things a bit
more, and put some patches of different colours on them, to show the
G. B. how much we wanted money. But Dora said that would be a sort
of cheating, pretending we were poorer than we are. And Dora is right
sometimes, though she is our elder sister. Then we thought we'd better
wear our best things, so that the G. B. might see we weren't so very
poor that he couldn't trust us to pay his money back when we had it. But
Dora said that would be wrong too. So it came to our being quite honest,
as Dora said, and going just as we were, without even washing our faces
and hands; but when I looked at H. O. in the train I wished we had not
been quite so particularly honest.

Every one who reads this knows what it is like to go in the train, so I
shall not tell about it--though it was rather fun, especially the part
where the guard came for the tickets at Waterloo, and H. O. was under
the seat and pretended to be a dog without a ticket. We