lar, and a
wine cellar with bins, and a keeping cellar with hooks in the ceiling
and stone shelves--just right for venison pasties and haunches of the
same swift animal.

Then we opened a door and there was a cellar with a well in it.

"To throw bodies down, no doubt," Oswald explained.

They were cellars full of glory, and passages leading from one to the
other like the Inquisition, and I wish ours at home were like them.

There was a pile of beer barrels in the largest cellar, and it was H.O.
who said, "Why not play 'King of the Castle?'"

So we did. We had a most refreshing game. It was exactly like Denny to
be the one who slipped down behind the barrels, and did not break a
single one of all his legs or arms.

"No," he cried, in answer to our anxious inquiries. "I'm not hurt a
bit, but the wall here feels soft--at least not soft--but it doesn't
scratch your nails like stone does, so perhaps it's the door of a secret
dungeon or something like that."

"Good old Dentist!" replied Oswald, who always likes Denny to have ideas
of his own, because it was us who taught him the folly of
white-mousishness.

"It might be," he went on, "but these barrels are as heavy as lead, and
much more awkward to collar hold of."

"Couldn't we get in some other way?" Alice said. "There ought to be a
subterranean passage. I expect there is if we only knew."

Oswald has an enormous geographical bump in his head. He said--

"Look here! That far cellar, where the wall doesn't go quite up to the
roof--that space we made out was under the dining-room--I could creep
under there. I believe it leads into behind this door."

"Get me out! Oh do, do get me out, and let me come!" shouted the
barrel-imprisoned Dentist from the unseen regions near the door.

So we got him out by Oswald lying flat on his front on the top barrel,
and the Dentist clawed himself up by Oswald's hands while the others
kept hold of the boots of the representative of the house of Bastable,
which, of course, Oswald is, whenever Father is not there.

"Come on," cried Oswald, when Denny was at last able to appear, very
cobwebby and black. "Give us what's left of the matches!"

The others agreed to stand by the barrels and answer our knocking on the
door if we ever got there.

"But I daresay we shall perish on the way," said Oswald hopefully.

So we started. The other cellar was easily found by the ingenious and
geography-bump-headed Oswald. It opened straight on