y behaved
like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others' turn to wave,
he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice's and Noel's hands, and
said poetry to them--yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it
seemed to comfort them. It wouldn't have me.

He said 'The Battle of the Baltic', and 'Gray's Elegy', right through,
though I think he got wrong in places, and the 'Revenge', and Macaulay's
thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he
waved like a man.

I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that
day, and no mouse.

The sun was low in the heavens, and we were sick of waving and very
hungry, when we saw a cart in the road below. We waved like mad, and
shouted, and Denny screamed exactly like a railway whistle, a thing none
of us had known before that he could do.

And the cart stopped. And presently we saw a figure with a white beard
among the trees. It was our Pig-man.

We bellowed the awful truth to him, and when he had taken it in--he
thought at first we were kidding--he came up and let us out.

He had got the pig; luckily it was a very small one--and we were not
particular. Denny and Alice sat on the front of the cart with the
Pig-man, and the rest of us got in with the pig, and the man drove us
right home. You may think we talked it over on the way. Not us. We went
to sleep, among the pig, and before long the Pig-man stopped and got us
to make room for Alice and Denny. There was a net over the cart. I never
was so sleepy in my life, though it was not more than bedtime.

Generally, after anything exciting, you are punished--but this could not
be, because we had only gone for a walk, exactly as we were told.

There was a new rule made, though. No walks except on the high-roads,
and we were always to take Pincher and either Lady, the deer-hound, or
Martha, the bulldog. We generally hate rules, but we did not mind this
one.

Father gave Denny a gold pencil-case because he was first to go down
into the tower. Oswald does not grudge Denny this, though some might
think he deserved at least a silver one. But Oswald is above such paltry
jealousies.

CHAPTER 5. THE WATERWORKS

This is the story of one of the most far-reaching and influentially
naughty things we ever did in our lives. We did not mean to do such
a deed. And yet we did do it. These things will happen with the
best-regulated consciences.

The story of this rash and fa