carriage, very gentle and
gay.

"But, Doctor," Oswald said, "he did say he'd give nine pounds a week for
the rooms. Oughtn't he to pay?"

"You might have known he was mad to say that," said the doctor. "No. Why
should he, when it's his own sister's house? Gee up!"

And he left us.

It was sad to find the gentleman was not a Higher Life after all, but
only mad. And I was more sorry than ever for poor Miss Sandal. As Oswald
pointed out to the girls they are much more blessed in their brothers
than Miss Sandal is, and they ought to be more grateful than they are.

_THE SMUGGLER'S REVENGE_

THE days went on and Miss Sandal did not return. We went on being very
sorry about Miss Sandal being so poor, and it was not our fault that
when we tried to let the house in lodgings, the first lodger proved to
be a lunatic of the deepest dye. Miss Sandal must have been a fairly
decent sort, because she seems not to have written to Father about it.
At any rate he didn't give it us in any of our letters, about our good
intentions and their ending in a maniac.

Oswald does not like giving up a thing just because it has once been
muffed. The muffage of a plan is a thing that often happens at first to
heroes--like Bruce and the spider, and other great characters. Beside,
grown-ups always say--

"If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try, try again!"

And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things
you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when
what you are after is your own idea, and not just the rotten notion of
that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who
composed the multiplication table. So we often talked about what we
could do to make Miss Sandal rich. It gave us something to jaw about
when we happened to want to sit down for a bit, in between all the
glorious wet sandy games that happen by the sea.

Of course if we wanted real improving conversation we used to go up to
the boat-house and talk to the coastguards. I do think coastguards are
A1. They are just the same as sailors, having been so in their youth,
and you can get at them to talk to, which is not the case with sailors
who are at sea (or even in harbours) on ships. Even if you had the luck
to get on to a man-of-war, you would very likely not be able to climb to
the top-gallants to talk to the man there. Though in books the young
hero always seems able to climb to the