uth to them in all its uninteresting nature.

I hope the reader will now prepare himself for a shock. In a wild whirl
of darkness, and the gas being cut off, and not being able to get any
light, and Father saying all sorts of things, it all came out.

Those coils and jars and wires in that cellar were not an infernal
machine at all. It was--I know you will be very much surprised--it was
the electric lights and bells that Father had had put in while we were
at the Red House the day before.

H.O. and Noel caught it very fully; and Oswald thinks this was one of
the few occasions when my Father was not as just as he meant to be. My
uncle was not just either, but then it is much longer since he was a
boy, so we must make excuses for him.

* * * * *

We sent Mrs. Red House a Christmas card each. In spite of the trouble
that her cellars had lured him into, Noel sent her a homemade one with
an endless piece of his everlasting poetry on it, and next May she wrote
and asked us to come and see her. _We_ try to be just, and we saw that
it was not really her fault that Noel and H.O. had cut those electric
wires, so we all went; but we did not take Albert Morrison, because he
was fortunately away with an aged god-parent of his mother's who writes
tracts at Tunbridge Wells.

The garden was all flowery and green, and Mr. and Mrs. Red House were
nice and jolly, and we had a distinguished and first-class time.

But would you believe it?--that boxish thing in the cellar, that H.O.
wanted them to make a rabbit-hutch of--well, Mr. Red House had cleaned
it and mended it, and Mrs. Red House took us up to the room where it
was, to let us look at it again. And, unbelievable to relate, it turned
out to have rockers, and some one in dark, bygone ages seems, for
reasons unknown to the present writer, to have wasted no end of
carpentry and carving on it, just to make it into a _Cradle_. And what
is more, since we were there last Mr. and Mrs. Red House had succeeded
in obtaining a small but quite alive baby to put in it.

I suppose they thought it was wilful waste to have a cradle and no baby
to use it. But it could so easily have been used for something else. It
would have made a ripping rabbit-hutch, and babies are far more trouble
than rabbits to keep, and not nearly so profitable, I believe.

_THE TURK IN CHAINS; OR, RICHARD'S REVENGE_

THE morning dawned in cloudless splendour. The sky was a pale