oes not come in this part of the story.

Then Dicky said, 'Look here. We'll be quite quiet for ten minutes by
the clock--and each think of some way to find treasure. And when we've
thought we'll try all the ways one after the other, beginning with the
eldest.'

'I shan't be able to think in ten minutes, make it half an hour,' said
H. O. His real name is Horace Octavius, but we call him H. O. because of
the advertisement, and it's not so very long ago he was afraid to pass
the hoarding where it says 'Eat H. O.' in big letters. He says it was
when he was a little boy, but I remember last Christmas but one, he woke
in the middle of the night crying and howling, and they said it was the
pudding. But he told me afterwards he had been dreaming that they really
_had_ come to eat H. O., and it couldn't have been the pudding, when you
come to think of it, because it was so very plain.

Well, we made it half an hour--and we all sat quiet, and thought and
thought. And I made up my mind before two minutes were over, and I
saw the others had, all but Dora, who is always an awful time over
everything. I got pins and needles in my leg from sitting still so long,
and when it was seven minutes H. O. cried out--'Oh, it must be more than
half an hour!'

H. O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could
tell the clock when he was six.

We all stretched ourselves and began to speak at once, but Dora put up
her hands to her ears and said--

'One at a time, please. We aren't playing Babel.' (It is a very good
game. Did you ever play it?)

So Dora made us all sit in a row on the floor, in ages, and then she
pointed at us with the finger that had the brass thimble on. Her silver
one got lost when the last General but two went away. We think she must
have forgotten it was Dora's and put it in her box by mistake. She was a
very forgetful girl. She used to forget what she had spent money on, so
that the change was never quite right.

Oswald spoke first. 'I think we might stop people on Blackheath--with
crape masks and horse-pistols--and say "Your money or your life!
Resistance is useless, we are armed to the teeth"--like Dick Turpin
and Claude Duval. It wouldn't matter about not having horses, because
coaches have gone out too.'

Dora screwed up her nose the way she always does when she is going to
talk like the good elder sister in books, and said, 'That would be
very wrong: it's like pickpocketing or taking penn