lsters. Your dam stopped the stream; the clay you took for it left
a channel through which it has run down and ruined about seven pounds'
worth of freshly-reaped barley. Luckily the farmer found it out in time
or you might have spoiled seventy pounds' worth. And you burned a bridge
yesterday.'

We said we were sorry. There was nothing else to say, only Alice added,
'We didn't MEAN to be naughty.'

'Of course not,' said Albert's uncle, 'you never do. Oh, yes, I'll kiss
you--but it's bed and it's two hundred lines to-morrow, and the line
is--"Beware of Being Beavers and Burning Bridges. Dread Dams." It will
be a capital exercise in capital B's and D's.'

We knew by that that, though annoyed, he was not furious; we went to
bed.

I got jolly sick of capital B's and D's before sunset on the morrow.
That night, just as the others were falling asleep, Oswald said--

'I say.'

'Well,' retorted his brother.

'There is one thing about it,' Oswald went on, 'it does show it was a
rattling good dam anyhow.'

And filled with this agreeable thought, the weary beavers (or explorers,
Polar or otherwise) fell asleep.

CHAPTER 8. THE HIGH-BORN BABE

It really was not such a bad baby--for a baby. Its face was round and
quite clean, which babies' faces are not always, as I daresay you know
by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was trimmed with
real lace, whatever that may be--I don't see myself how one kind of
lace can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of
perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by
itself in the lane that leads to the mill.

'I wonder whose baby it is,' Dora said. 'Isn't it a darling, Alice?'

Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely
the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.

'These two, as likely as not,' Noel said. 'Can't you see something
crime-like in the very way they're lying?'

They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge of
the lane on the shady side fast asleep, only a very little further on
than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and their snores did
have a sinister sound.

'I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of night, and they've been
travelling hot-foot ever since, so now they're sleeping the sleep
of exhaustedness,' Alice said. 'What a heart-rending scene when the
patrician mother wakes in the morning and finds the infant aristocrat
isn't in bed with