ine.

The sun was setting (in the west as usual) before Alice and Noel
returned. They came across the wide fields from the direction of a
pinewood that we had never explored yet, though always meaning to.

'There!' said Dicky, 'they've been and gone to the pinewood all by
themselves.'

But the hatchet Dicky was still cherishing in his breast was buried at
once under the first words spoken by the returning party of explorers.

'Oh, Oswald,' said Alice, 'oh, Dicky, we've found a treasure!'

Dicky hammered the last nail into the Saracen watch-tower.

'Not a real money one?' he said, dropping the hammer--which was a
careless thing to do, and the author told him so at the time.

'No, not a money one, but it's real all the same. Let's have a council,
and I'll tell you.'

It was then that Dicky showed that if he dropped hammers it was not
because he could not bury hatchets. He said, 'Righto! There's room for
us all up here. Catch hold, Noel. Oswald, give him a shove up. Alice and
he can sit in the Saracens' watch-tower, and I'll keep hold of H. O. if
you'll hand him up.'

Alice was full of the politest compliments about the architecture of the
Saracens' watch-tower, and Noel said:

'I say, Dicky, I'm awfully sorry about your prize.'

'It's all right,' said Dicky; 'I rubbed it out with bread.'

Noel opened his mouth. He looks like a very young bird when he does
this.

'Then my beautiful poem's turned into dirty bread-crumbs,' he said
slowly.

'Never mind,' said Alice; 'I remember nearly every word of it: we'll
write it out again after tea.'

'I thought you'd be so pleased,' Noel went on, 'because it makes a book
more valuable to have an author's writing in it. Albert's uncle told me
so.'

'But it has to be the same author that wrote the book,' Alice explained,
'and it was Caesar wrote that book. And you aren't Caesar _yet_, you
know.'

'Nor don't want to be,' said Noel.

Oswald now thought that politeness was satisfied on both sides, so he
said:

'What price treasures?'

And then Alice told. But it had to be in whispers, because the next-door
people, who always did things at times when not convenient to us, were
now taking in their washing off the line. I heard them remark that it
was a 'good drying day.'

'Well,' Alice mysteriously observed, 'it was like this. (Do you think
the Saracens' watch-tower is really safe for two? It seems to go down
awfully much in the middle.)'

'Sit nearer the ends, t