great deal of your comfort and happiness depends on
having a good General. The last but one was nice: she used to make jolly
good currant puddings for us, and let us have the dish on the floor
and pretend it was a wild boar we were killing with our forks. But the
General we have now nearly always makes sago puddings, and they are
the watery kind, and you cannot pretend anything with them, not even
islands, like you do with porridge.

Then we left off going to school, and Father said we should go to a good
school as soon as he could manage it. He said a holiday would do us all
good. We thought he was right, but we wished he had told us he couldn't
afford it. For of course we knew.

Then a great many people used to come to the door with envelopes with
no stamps on them, and sometimes they got very angry, and said they
were calling for the last time before putting it in other hands. I asked
Eliza what that meant, and she kindly explained to me, and I was so
sorry for Father.

And once a long, blue paper came; a policeman brought it, and we were
so frightened. But Father said it was all right, only when he went up
to kiss the girls after they were in bed they said he had been crying,
though I'm sure that's not true. Because only cowards and snivellers
cry, and my Father is the bravest man in the world.

So you see it was time we looked for treasure and Oswald said so, and
Dora said it was all very well. But the others agreed with Oswald. So we
held a council. Dora was in the chair--the big dining-room chair, that
we let the fireworks off from, the Fifth of November when we had the
measles and couldn't do it in the garden. The hole has never been
mended, so now we have that chair in the nursery, and I think it was
cheap at the blowing-up we boys got when the hole was burnt.

'We must do something,' said Alice, 'because the exchequer is empty.'
She rattled the money-box as she spoke, and it really did rattle because
we always keep the bad sixpence in it for luck.

'Yes--but what shall we do?' said Dicky. 'It's so jolly easy to say
let's do _something_.' Dicky always wants everything settled exactly.
Father calls him the Definite Article.

'Let's read all the books again. We shall get lots of ideas out of
them.' It was Noel who suggested this, but we made him shut up, because
we knew well enough he only wanted to get back to his old books. Noel
is a poet. He sold some of his poetry once--and it was printed, but that
d