e tin dish the Lent pie was baked in we polished with our
handkerchiefs, and moved it about in the sun so that the sun might
strike on it and signal our distress to some of the outlying farms.

This was perhaps the most dreadful adventure that had then ever happened
to us. Even Alice had now stopped thinking of Mr. Richard Ravenal, and
thought only of the lurker in ambush.

We all felt our desperate situation keenly. I must say Denny behaved
like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others' turn to wave,
he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice's and Noel's hands, and
said poetry to them--yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it
seemed to comfort them. It wouldn't have me.

He said "The Battle of the Baltic," and "Gray's Elegy," right through,
though I think he got wrong in places, and the "Revenge," and Macaulay's
thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he
waved like a man.

I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that
day, and no mouse.

The sun was low in the heavens, and we were sick of waving and very
hungry, when we saw a cart in the road below. We waved like mad, and
shouted, and Denny screamed exactly like a railway whistle, a thing none
of us had known before that he could do.

[Illustration: "DENNY HELD ALICE'S AND NOEL'S HANDS"]

And the cart stopped. And presently we saw a figure with a white beard
among the trees. It was our pig-man.

We bellowed the awful truth to him, and when he had taken it in--he
thought at first we were kidding--he came up and let us out.

He had got the pig; luckily it was a very small one--and we were not
particular. Denny and Alice sat on the front of the cart with the
pig-man, and the rest of us got in with the pig, and the man drove us
right home. You may think we talked it over on the way. Not us. We went
to sleep, among the pig, and before long the pig-man stopped and got us
to make room for Alice and Denny. There was a net over the cart. I never
was so sleepy in my life, though it was not more than bedtime.

Generally, after anything exciting, you are punished--but this could not
be, because we had only gone for a walk, exactly as we were told.

There was a new rule made, though. No walks, except on the high-roads,
and we were always to take Pincher, and either Lady, the deer-hound, or
Martha, the bull-dog. We generally hate rules, but we did not mind this
one.

Father gave Denny a gol