ready to cry and make it up, I see how silly it is, and I want to
laugh; but it doesn't do to say so--for it only makes the others crosser
than they were before. I wonder why that is?

Alice said Noel ought to be poet laureate, and she actually went out
in the cold and got some laurel leaves--the spotted kind--out of
the garden, and Dora made a crown and we put it on him. He was quite
pleased; but the leaves made a mess, and Eliza said, 'Don't.' I believe
that's a word grown-ups use more than any other. Then suddenly Alice
thought of that old idea of hers for finding treasure, and she said--'Do
let's try the divining-rod.'

So Oswald said, 'Fair priestess, we do greatly desire to find gold
beneath our land, therefore we pray thee practise with the divining-rod,
and tell us where we can find it.'

'Do ye desire to fashion of it helms and hauberks?' said Alice.

'Yes,' said Noel; 'and chains and ouches.'

'I bet you don't know what an "ouch" is,' said Dicky.

'Yes I do, so there!' said Noel. 'It's a carcanet. I looked it out in
the dicker, now then!' We asked him what a carcanet was, but he wouldn't
say.

'And we want to make fair goblets of the gold,' said Oswald.

'Yes, to drink coconut milk out of,' said H. O.

'And we desire to build fair palaces of it,' said Dicky.

'And to buy things,' said Dora; 'a great many things. New Sunday frocks
and hats and kid gloves and--'

She would have gone on for ever so long only we reminded her that we
hadn't found the gold yet.

By this Alice had put on the nursery tablecloth, which is green, and
tied the old blue and yellow antimacassar over her head, and she said--

'If your intentions are correct, fear nothing and follow me.'

And she went down into the hall. We all followed chanting 'Heroes.' It
is a gloomy thing the girls learnt at the High School, and we always use
it when we want a priestly chant.

Alice stopped short by the hat-stand, and held up her hands as well as
she could for the tablecloth, and said--

'Now, great altar of the golden idol, yield me the divining-rod that I
may use it for the good of the suffering people.'

The umbrella-stand was the altar of the golden idol, and it yielded her
the old school umbrella. She carried it between her palms.

'Now,' she said, 'I shall sing the magic chant. You mustn't say
anything, but just follow wherever I go--like follow my leader, you
know--and when there is gold underneath the magic rod will twist in