w the
Kentish Town Road where the trams rush up and down like mad at all hours
of the day and night, and seem as though, if anything, they would rather
run over you than not.

They had promised to be home by dark, but it was July, so dark would be
very late indeed, and long past bedtime.

They started to walk to St James's Park, and all their pockets were
stuffed with bits of bread and the crusts of toast, to feed the ducks
with. They started, I repeat, but they never got there.

Between Fitzroy Street and St James's Park there are a great many
streets, and, if you go the right way you will pass a great many shops
that you cannot possibly help stopping to look at. The children stopped
to look at several with gold-lace and beads and pictures and jewellery
and dresses, and hats, and oysters and lobsters in their windows, and
their sorrow did not seem nearly so impossible to bear as it had done in
the best parlour at No. 300, Fitzroy Street.

Presently, by some wonderful chance turn of Robert's (who had been voted
Captain because the girls thought it would be good for him--and indeed
he thought so himself--and of course Cyril couldn't vote against him
because it would have looked like a mean jealousy), they came into the
little interesting criss-crossy streets that held the most interesting
shops of all--the shops where live things were sold. There was one shop
window entirely filled with cages, and all sorts of beautiful birds in
them. The children were delighted till they remembered how they had once
wished for wings themselves, and had had them--and then they felt how
desperately unhappy anything with wings must be if it is shut up in a
cage and not allowed to fly.

'It must be fairly beastly to be a bird in a cage,' said Cyril. 'Come
on!'

They went on, and Cyril tried to think out a scheme for making his
fortune as a gold-digger at Klondyke, and then buying all the caged
birds in the world and setting them free. Then they came to a shop that
sold cats, but the cats were in cages, and the children could not help
wishing someone would buy all the cats and put them on hearthrugs, which
are the proper places for cats. And there was the dog-shop, and that was
not a happy thing to look at either, because all the dogs were chained
or caged, and all the dogs, big and little, looked at the four children
with sad wistful eyes and wagged beseeching tails as if they were trying
to say, 'Buy me! buy me! buy me! and let me g