nd when the tree was trimmed he and
Phyllis carried it downstairs. The top branch with the star on it got
banged against the banisters, and the side branch got into Guy's eye,
and Phyllis's thumb got jammed between the pot and the banister rail.
But what are trifles like these in an adventure like this?

They got the tree out of the front-door without being seen by the
servants--a real triumph. They stood the pot in the barrow, and started
to wheel it out of the front-gate. But directly they lifted the handles
of the barrow the floor of it naturally ceased to be straight, and the
flower-pot toppled over and cracked itself slightly against the side of
the barrow, while the boughs of the tree, with their gay decorations,
took the opportunity to entangle themselves in the bad-tempered leaves
of the holly that stood there, and were disengaged with difficulty.

Then the pot refused to stand up, and at last it had to be laid down in
the barrow, with its shiny treasures dangling over the front-wheel.

Then, the barrow was extremely heavy even without the tree in it; and
the children did not go the nearest way to the Grotto, because they did
not want to meet people, so they were thoroughly tired and extremely hot
by the time they approached Sir Christopher Cockleshell's castle.

There was a bit of waste land close to it, where someone had once begun
to build a house and had then thought better of it. A bit of this
house's wall was standing on each side of the space where its front-door
would have been if it had ever come to the point of having one. They
wheeled the barrow in, and the light of a street lamp that obligingly
shone through the door-space made it possible for them to disentangle
the little strings that had got twisted round each other, to disengage
the gilt fish from the sugar bird-cage, and to take the glass bird out
of the goose-bone armchair in which it was trying to sit. Also they set
up all the candles--six dozen of them. This is done with tin-tacks, as
no doubt you know.

'Now,' said Guy, 'one of us must go and ask if he'll let us light it in
his yard, and one of us must wait here with the tree.'

'What about me?' said Mabel.

'You can do which you like,' said Guy.

'I want to do both,' said Mabel; 'I want to stay with the pretty tree,
_and_ I want to go and ask him if he wants us.'

Mabel was still too small to understand thoroughly how hard it is, even
for a grown-up person, to be in two places at o