th a view of Greenwich
Park in the little hole where you look through at the top. He was most
awfully pleased and surprised, and when he heard how Noel and Oswald had
earned the money to buy the things he was more surprised still. Nearly
all the rest of our money went to get fireworks for the Fifth of
November. We got six Catherine wheels and four rockets; two hand-lights,
one red and one green; a sixpenny maroon; two Roman-candles--they cost
a shilling; some Italian streamers, a fairy fountain, and a tourbillon
that cost eighteen-pence and was very nearly worth it.

But I think crackers and squibs are a mistake. It's true you get a lot
of them for the money, and they are not bad fun for the first two or
three dozen, but you get jolly sick of them before you've let off your
sixpenn'orth. And the only amusing way is not allowed: it is putting
them in the fire.

It always seems a long time till the evening when you have got fireworks
in the house, and I think as it was a rather foggy day we should have
decided to let them off directly after breakfast, only Father had said
he would help us to let them off at eight o'clock after he had had his
dinner, and you ought never to disappoint your father if you can help
it.

You see we had three good reasons for trying H. O.'s idea of restoring
the fallen fortunes of our house by becoming bandits on the Fifth of
November. We had a fourth reason as well, and that was the best reason
of the lot. You remember Dora thought it would be wrong to be bandits.
And the Fifth of November came while Dora was away at Stroud staying
with her godmother. Stroud is in Gloucestershire. We were determined to
do it while she was out of the way, because we did not think it wrong,
and besides we meant to do it anyhow.

We held a Council, of course, and laid our plans very carefully. We let
H. O. be Captain, because it was his idea. Oswald was Lieutenant. Oswald
was quite fair, because he let H. O. call himself Captain; but Oswald is
the eldest next to Dora, after all.

Our plan was this. We were all to go up on to the Heath. Our house is in
the Lewisham Road, but it's quite close to the Heath if you cut up the
short way opposite the confectioner's, past the nursery gardens and
the cottage hospital, and turn to the left again and afterwards to the
right. You come out then at the top of the hill, where the big guns are
with the iron fence round them, and where the bands play on Thursday
evenings in