beneath an umbragipeaous
beech-tree and ate black currants.

"'Dear brothers and sisters,' the blushing girl went on, 'could we not,
even now, at the eleventh hour, turn to account these wasted lives of
ours, and seek some occupation at once improving and agreeable?'

"'I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister,' replied the
cleverest of her brothers, on whose brow--"

It's no use. I can't write like these books. I wonder how the books'
authors can keep it up.

What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the
orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said:

"I say, look here, let's do something. It's simply silly to waste a day
like this. It's just on eleven. Come on!"

And Oswald said, "Where to?"

This was the beginning of it.

The moat that is all round our house is fed by streams. One of them is a
sort of open overflow pipe from a good-sized stream that flows at the
other side of the orchard.

It was this stream that Alice meant when she said:

"Why not go and discover the source of the Nile?"

Of course Oswald knows quite well that the source of the real live
Egyptian Nile is no longer buried in that mysteriousness where it lurked
undisturbed for such a long time. But he was not going to say so. It is
a great thing to know when not to say things.

"Why not have it an arctic expedition?" said Dicky; "then we could take
an ice-axe and live on blubber and things. Besides, it sounds cooler."

"Vote! vote!" cried Oswald. So we did.

Oswald, Alice, Noel, and Denny voted for the river of the ibis and the
crocodile. Dicky, H. O., and the other girls for the region of perennial
winter and rich blubber.

So Alice said, "We can decide as we go. Let's start, anyway."

The question of supplies had now to be gone into. Everybody wanted to
take something different, and nobody thought the other people's things
would be the slightest use. It is sometimes thus even with grown-up
expeditions. So then Oswald, who is equal to the hardest emergency that
ever emerged yet, said:

"Let's each get what we like. The secret storehouse can be the shed in
the corner of the stable-yard where we got the door for the raft. Then
the captain can decide who's to take what."

This was done. You may think it but the work of a moment to fit out an
expedition, but this is not so, especially when you know not whether
your exploring party is speeding to Central Africa or merely to the
world of icebergs an