ain inside yourself whether what you're doing is right if you happen
to like doing it, but if you don't like doing it you know quite well. I
only thought of that just now. I wish Noel would make a poem about it."

"I am," Noel said; "it began about a crocodile, but it is finishing
itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a
minute."

He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little
friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:

"The crocodile is very wise,
He lives in the Nile with little eyes,
He eats the hippopotamus too,
And if he could he would eat up you.

"The lovely woods and starry skies
He looks upon with glad surprise;
He sees the riches of the east,
And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.

"So let all be good and beware
Of saying sha'n't and won't and don't care;
For doing wrong is easier far
Than any of the right things I know about are.

And I couldn't make it king of beasts because of it not rhyming with
east, so I put the _s_ off beasts on to king. It comes even in the end."

We all said it was a very nice piece of poetry. Noel gets really ill if
you don't like what he writes, and then he said, "If it's trying that's
wanted, I don't care how hard we _try_ to be good, but we may as well
do it some nice way. Let's be Pilgrim's Progress, like I wanted to at
first."

And we were all beginning to say we didn't want to, when suddenly Dora
said, "Oh, look here! I know. We'll be the Canterbury Pilgrims. People
used to go pilgrimages to make themselves good."

"With pease in their shoes," the Dentist said. "It's in a piece of
poetry--only the man boiled his pease--which is quite unfair."

"Oh yes," said H. O., "and cocked hats."

"Not cocked--cockled"--it was Alice who said this. "And they had staffs
and scrips, and they told each other tales. We might as well."

Oswald and Dora had been reading about the Canterbury Pilgrims in a book
called A _Short History of the English People_. It is not at all short
really--three fat volumes--but it has jolly good pictures. It was
written by a gentleman named Green. So Oswald said:

"All right. I'll be the Knight."

"I'll be the wife of Bath," Dora said. "What will you be, Dicky?"

"Oh, I don't care, I'll be Mr. Bath if you like."

"We don't know much about the people," Alice said. "How many were
there?"

"Thirty," Oswald replied, "but we needn't