tion: We made holes at the crusty side of the slices, and tied
them with string.]

It was no good thinking of splitting the slices, we had to make the best
of them, thick as they were. And it took all our planningness to do
without a toasting-fork. The tea-spoons were so short that it burnt our
hands to hold them so near the fire, and for a minute or two we were
quite in despair. At last we managed it. We made holes at the crusty
side of the slices, and _tied_ them with string--of which, of course,
there were always plenty of bits in Tom's pockets; I believe if he'd
been in a desert island for a year he still would have found bits of
string to put in his pockets--to the end of the poker and to the two
ends of the tongs. They dangled away beautifully; two succeeded
admirably, the third unfortunately was hopelessly burnt. We repeated the
operation for another set of slices, which all succeeded, then we spread
them with the scraped butter in front of the fire by means of the flat
ends of our tea-spoons, and at last, very hot, very buttery, very
hungry, but triumphant, we sat round the table again to regale ourselves
with our tepid tea, but beautifully hot toast, whose perfection was
completed by a good thick layer of strawberry jam.

We had eaten three slices, and were just about considering how we could
quite fairly divide the remaining two among the three of us,--rather a
puzzle, for Tom's proposal that he and I should each take a slice and
give Racey half, didn't do.

"That would give Racey a half more than us--at least a quarter more. No,
it wouldn't be a quarter either. Any way, that wouldn't do," I said.
"Let's cut each slice into three bits and each take two."

"And how can we cut without a knife?" said Tom.

"'How can he marry without a wife?'" I quoted out of the nursery rhyme,
which set us all off laughing, so that we didn't hear a terrible sound
steadily approaching the door. Stump, stump, it came, but we heard
nothing till the door actually opened, and even then we didn't stop
laughing all at once. We were excited by our toast-making; it was the
first time since we were in London that our spirits had begun to recover
themselves, and it wasn't easy to put them down again in a hurry. Even
the sight of Mrs. Partridge's _very_ cross face at the door didn't do so
all at once.

I dare say we looked very wild, we were very buttery and jammy, and our
faces were still broiling, our hair in confusion and our pinafo