er.

That's how we've done for a long time--ages. But next year I'm going to
school.

I'm to go when I'm twelve. My birthday comes in November. It's just
been; that's how I said 'I'm eleven,' not eleven and a quarter, or
eleven and a half--just eleven. And I'm to go at the end of the
Christmas holidays after that. I don't much mind; at least I don't think
I do. I'll have more lessons and more games in a regular way, and I'll
have less worries, anyway at first. For I shall be counted a small boy,
of course, and I shan't have to look after others and be blamed for
them, the way I have to look after the girls at home. It'll really be a
sort of rest. I've had such a lot of looking after other people. I
really have.

Mums says so herself sometimes. She even says I have to look after her.
And it's true. She's awfully good--she's almost an angel--but she's a
tiny bit like Anne. She's rather untidy. Not to look at, ever. She's as
neat as a pin, and then she's very pretty; but she's careless--she says
so herself. She so often loses things, because she's got a trick of
putting them down anywhere she happens to be. Often and often I go to
her room when she's dressing, and tap at the door and say--

'Have you lost something, mums?'

And ten to one she'll call back--

'Yes, my dear town-crier, I have.' ('My gloves,' or 'my card-case,' or
'my keys,' or, oh! almost anything.) 'But I wasn't worrying about it; I
knew you'd find it, Jack.'

And Maud does finder for Anne, just the same way, only _her_ finding
sometimes gets me into trouble. Just fancy that. If Anne loses
something, and Maud is hunting away and doesn't find it all at once,
they'll turn upon me--they truly will--and say--

'You _might_ help her, Jack, you really might, poor little thing! It's
no trouble to you to run up and down stairs, and she's so little.'

When that sort of thing happens, I do feel that I've got a rather nasty
temper.

I've begun about losing things, because our adventures had to do with a
very big losing. The first adventure came straight from it, and the
rest had to do with it.

It's funny how things hang together like that. You think of something
that's come, and you remember what made it happen, and then you go back
to the beginning of _that_, and you see it came from something else; and
you go on feeling it out like, till you're quite astonished to find what
a perfectly different thing had started it all from what you would have
thoug