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AN OBJECT OF VALUE AND VIRTUE

This happened a very little time after we left our humble home in
Lewisham, and went to live at the Blackheath house of our Indian uncle,
which was replete with every modern convenience, and had a big garden
and a great many greenhouses. We had had a lot of jolly Christmas
presents, and one of them was Dicky's from father, and it was a
printing-press. Not one of the eighteenpenny kind that never come off,
but a real tip-topper, that you could have printed a whole newspaper out
of if you could have been clever enough to make up all the stuff there
is in newspapers. I don't know how people can do it. It's all about
different things, but it is all just the same too. But the author is
sorry to find he is not telling things from the beginning, as he has
been taught. The printing-press really doesn't come into the story till
quite a long way on. So it is no use your wondering what it was that we
did print with the printing-press. It was not a newspaper, anyway, and
it wasn't my young brother's poetry, though he and the girls did do an
awful lot of that. It was something much more far-reaching, as you will
see if you wait.

There wasn't any skating those holidays, because it was what they call
nice open weather. That means it was simply muggy, and you could play
out of doors without grown-ups fussing about your overcoat, or bringing
you to open shame in the streets with knitted comforters, except, of
course, the poet Noel, who is young, and equal to having bronchitis if
he only looks at a pair of wet boots. But the girls were indoors a good
deal, trying to make things for a bazaar which the people our
housekeeper's elder sister lives with were having in the country for the
benefit of a poor iron church that was in difficulties. And Noel and H.
O. were with them, putting sweets in bags for the bazaar's lucky-tub. So
Dicky and I were out alone together. But we were not angry with the
others for their stuffy way of spending a day. Two is not a good number,
though, for any game except fives; and the man who ordered the vineries
and pineries, and butlers' pantries and things, never had the sense to
tell the builders to make a fives court. Some people never think of the
simplest things. So we had been playing catch with a fives ball. It was
Dicky's ball, and Oswald said:

'I bet you can't hit it over the house.'

'What do you bet?' said Dicky.

And Oswald re