aw she meant it, so I said, 'Let's
have a squint,' and I looked, but I couldn't see anything, even when I
lay down on my stomach. The others lay down on their stomachs too and
tried to see, all but Noel, who stood and looked at us and said we were
the great serpents come down to drink at the magic pool. He wanted to be
the knight and slay the great serpents with his good sword--he even drew
the umbrella ready--but Alice said, 'All right, we will in a minute. But
now--I'm sure I saw it; do get a match, Noel, there's a dear.'

'What did you see?' asked Noel, beginning to go for the matches very
slowly.

'Something bright, away in the corner under the board against the beam.'

'Perhaps it was a rat's eye,' Noel said, 'or a snake's,' and we did
not put our heads quite so close to the hole till he came back with the
matches.

Then I struck a match, and Alice cried, 'There it is!' And there it was,
and it was a half-sovereign, partly dusty and partly bright. We think
perhaps a mouse, disturbed by the carpets being taken up, may have
brushed the dust of years from part of the half-sovereign with his tail.
We can't imagine how it came there, only Dora thinks she remembers once
when H. O. was very little Mother gave him some money to hold, and he
dropped it, and it rolled all over the floor. So we think perhaps this
was part of it. We were very glad. H. O. wanted to go out at once and
buy a mask he had seen for fourpence. It had been a shilling mask, but
now it was going very cheap because Guy Fawkes' Day was over, and it was
a little cracked at the top. But Dora said, 'I don't know that it's our
money. Let's wait and ask Father.'

But H. O. did not care about waiting, and I felt for him. Dora is rather
like grown-ups in that way; she does not seem to understand that when
you want a thing you do want it, and that you don't wish to wait, even a
minute.

So we went and asked Albert-next-door's uncle. He was pegging away at
one of the rotten novels he has to write to make his living, but he said
we weren't interrupting him at all.

'My hero's folly has involved him in a difficulty,' he said. 'It is his
own fault. I will leave him to meditate on the incredible fatuity--the
hare-brained recklessness--which have brought him to this pass. It will
be a lesson to him. I, meantime, will give myself unreservedly to the
pleasures of your conversation.'

That's one thing I like Albert's uncle for. He always talks like a book,
and y