his mamma.'

The Baby was fast asleep or else the girls would have kissed it. They
are strangely fond of kissing. The author never could see anything in it
himself.

'If the gipsies DID steal it,' Dora said 'perhaps they'd sell it to us.
I wonder what they'd take for it.'

'What could you do with it if you'd got it?' H. O. asked.

'Why, adopt it, of course,' Dora said. 'I've often thought I should
enjoy adopting a baby. It would be a golden deed, too. We've hardly got
any in the book yet.'

'I should have thought there were enough of us,' Dicky said.

'Ah, but you're none of you babies,' said Dora.

'Unless you count H. O. as a baby: he behaves jolly like one sometimes.'

This was because of what had happened that morning when Dicky found
H. O. going fishing with a box of worms, and the box was the one Dicky
keeps his silver studs in, and the medal he got at school, and what is
left of his watch and chain. The box is lined with red velvet and it was
not nice afterwards. And then H. O. said Dicky had hurt him, and he was
a beastly bully, and he cried. We thought all this had been made up, and
were sorry to see it threaten to break out again. So Oswald said--

'Oh, bother the Baby! Come along, do!'

And the others came.

We were going to the miller's with a message about some flour that
hadn't come, and about a sack of sharps for the pigs.

After you go down the lane you come to a clover-field, and then a
cornfield, and then another lane, and then it is the mill. It is a
jolly fine mill: in fact it is two--water and wind ones--one of each
kind--with a house and farm buildings as well. I never saw a mill like
it, and I don't believe you have either.

If we had been in a story-book the miller's wife would have taken us
into the neat sanded kitchen where the old oak settle was black
with time and rubbing, and dusted chairs for us--old brown Windsor
chairs--and given us each a glass of sweet-scented cowslip wine and
a thick slice of rich home-made cake. And there would have been fresh
roses in an old china bowl on the table. As it was, she asked us all
into the parlour and gave us Eiffel Tower lemonade and Marie biscuits.
The chairs in her parlour were 'bent wood', and no flowers, except some
wax ones under a glass shade, but she was very kind, and we were very
much obliged to her. We got out to the miller, though, as soon as we
could; only Dora and Daisy stayed with her, and she talked to them about
her lodge