rds, and he had a
gentleman's voice.

'I'm sure you weren't brought up to be a pirate,' said Dora. She had
dressed even to her collar--and made Noel do it too--but the rest of us
were in blankets with just a few odd things put on anyhow underneath.

The robber frowned and sighed.

'No,' he said, 'I was brought up to the law. I was at Balliol, bless
your hearts, and that's true anyway.' He sighed again, and looked hard
at the fire.

'That was my Father's college,' H. O. was beginning, but Dicky
said--'Why did you leave off being a pirate?'

'A pirate?' he said, as if he had not been thinking of such things.

'Oh, yes; why I gave it up because--because I could not get over the
dreadful sea-sickness.'

'Nelson was sea-sick,' said Oswald.

'Ah,' said the robber; 'but I hadn't his luck or his pluck, or
something. He stuck to it and won Trafalgar, didn't he? "Kiss me,
Hardy"--and all that, eh? _I_ couldn't stick to it--I had to resign. And
nobody kissed _me_.'

I saw by his understanding about Nelson that he was really a man who had
been to a good school as well as to Balliol.

Then we asked him, 'And what did you do then?'

And Alice asked if he was ever a coiner, and we told him how we had
thought we'd caught the desperate gang next door, and he was very much
interested and said he was glad he had never taken to coining.

'Besides, the coins are so ugly nowadays,' he said, 'no one could really
find any pleasure in making them. And it's a hole-and-corner business
at the best, isn't it?--and it must be a very thirsty one--with the hot
metal and furnaces and things.'

And again he looked at the fire.

Oswald forgot for a minute that the interesting stranger was a robber,
and asked him if he wouldn't have a drink. Oswald has heard Father do
this to his friends, so he knows it is the right thing. The robber said
he didn't mind if he did. And that is right, too.

And Dora went and got a bottle of Father's ale--the Light Sparkling
Family--and a glass, and we gave it to the robber. Dora said she would
be responsible.

Then when he had had a drink he told us about bandits, but he said it
was so bad in wet weather. Bandits' caves were hardly ever properly
weathertight. And bush-ranging was the same.

'As a matter of fact,' he said, 'I was bush-ranging this afternoon,
among the furze-bushes on the Heath, but I had no luck. I stopped the
Lord Mayor in his gilt coach, with all his footmen in plush and gold
lace, s