reading a book by Dick Diddlington--that's not his right
name, but I know all about libel actions, so I shall not say what his
name is really, because his books are rot. Only they put it into our
heads to do what I am going to narrate.

It was in September, and we were not to go to the seaside because it is
so expensive, even if you go to Sheerness, where it is all tin cans and
old boots and no sand at all. But every one else went, even the people
next door--not Albert's side, but the other. Their servant told Eliza
they were all going to Scarborough, and next day sure enough all the
blinds were down and the shutters up, and the milk was not left any
more. There is a big horse-chestnut tree between their garden and ours,
very useful for getting conkers out of and for making stuff to rub on
your chilblains. This prevented our seeing whether the blinds were
down at the back as well, but Dicky climbed to the top of the tree and
looked, and they were.

It was jolly hot weather, and very stuffy indoors--we used to play a
good deal in the garden. We made a tent out of the kitchen clothes-horse
and some blankets off our beds, and though it was quite as hot in the
tent as in the house it was a very different sort of hotness. Albert's
uncle called it the Turkish Bath. It is not nice to be kept from the
seaside, but we know that we have much to be thankful for. We might be
poor little children living in a crowded alley where even at summer
noon hardly a ray of sunlight penetrates; clothed in rags and with bare
feet--though I do not mind holes in my clothes myself, and bare
feet would not be at all bad in this sort of weather. Indeed we do,
sometimes, when we are playing at things which require it. It was
shipwrecked mariners that day, I remember, and we were all in the
blanket tent. We had just finished eating the things we had saved, at
the peril of our lives, from the st-sinking vessel. They were rather
nice things. Two-pennyworth of coconut candy--it was got in Greenwich,
where it is four ounces a penny--three apples, some macaroni--the
straight sort that is so useful to suck things through--some raw rice,
and a large piece of cold suet pudding that Alice nicked from the larder
when she went to get the rice and macaroni. And when we had finished
some one said--

'I should like to be a detective.'

I wish to be quite fair, but I cannot remember exactly who said it.
Oswald thinks he said it, and Dora says it was Dicky, but O