on: He staggered, and had to sit down again in a hurry]

It was decided that Cyril should go into the Blue Boar and ask for
ginger-beer, because, as Anthea said, "It was not wrong for men to go
into beer-saloons, only for children. And Cyril is nearer being a man
than us, because he is the eldest." So he went. The others sat in the
sun and waited.

"Oh, how hot it is!" said Robert. "Dogs put their tongues out when
they're hot; I wonder if it would cool us at all to put out ours?"

"We might try," Jane said; and they all put their tongues out as far as
ever they could go, so that it quite stretched their throats, but it
only seemed to make them thirstier than ever, besides annoying everyone
who went by. So they took their tongues in again, just as Cyril came
back with ginger-beer.

"I had to pay for it out of my own money, though, that I was going to
buy rabbits with," he said. "They wouldn't change the gold. And when I
pulled out a handful the man just laughed and said it was card-counters.
And I got some sponge-cakes too, out of a glass jar on the bar-counter.
And some biscuits with caraways in."

The sponge-cakes were both soft and dry and the biscuits were dry too,
and yet soft, which biscuits ought not to be. But the ginger-beer made
up for everything.

"It's my turn now to try to buy something with the money," Anthea said;
"I'm next eldest. Where is the pony-cart kept?"

It was at The Chequers, and Anthea went in the back way to the yard,
because they all knew that little girls ought not to go into the bars of
beer-saloons. She came out, as she herself said, "pleased but not
proud."

"He'll be ready in a brace of shakes, he says," she remarked, "and he's
to have one sovereign--or whatever it is--to drive us into Rochester and
back, besides waiting there till we've got everything we want. I think I
managed very well."

"You think yourself jolly clever, I daresay," said Cyril moodily. "How
did you do it?"

"I wasn't jolly clever enough to go taking handfuls of money out of my
pocket, to make it seem cheap, anyway," she retorted. "I just found a
young man doing something to a horse's legs with a sponge and a pail.
And I held out one sovereign, and I said--'Do you know what this is?' He
said 'No,' and he'd call his father. And the old man came, and he said
it was a spade guinea; and he said was it my own to do as I liked with,
and I said 'Yes'; and I asked about the pony-cart, and I said he could
have the