ation: Hal asleep]

Meanwhile, Drusie had planned a busy afternoon for herself and the
others, for they intended to go to the fort and make ammunition for
Tuesday.

Few children had nicer grounds to play in than the Danvers children.
The garden was very large, and besides the lawn and the winding walks
among the shrubberies, which afforded such capital hiding-places when
they played hide-and-seek, there was the large kitchen-garden as well.
Beyond the kitchen-garden lay pleasant, sunny fields, at the foot of
which flowed a small stream that farther down joined the river in which
Jumbo had been so nearly drowned. On the other side of the stream lay
a long slip of land which Mr. Danvers always spoke of as a waste piece
of ground, and over which he sometimes threatened to send the plough.
But partly because the ground was really too poor to be of much good,
and partly because the children begged him to leave it alone, it had
never yet been disturbed, and the Wilderness, as they had named it,
remained theirs to all intents and purposes.

That the Wilderness was a brambly place could not be denied. It had
originally been a grove of nut trees, and though some of these still
flourished and bore nuts that had not their equal for size and flavour
in all the country-side, they had for the most part been strangled by
blackberry bushes and briers, and smothered by masses of wild clematis.

The fort stood in a corner of the Wilderness. Within a few yards of it
on one side was the stream; on the other and at the back it was
surrounded by densely-growing hawthorn bushes. But the front was open
and exposed to attack, for a cleared space in which only a few
scattered nut trees grew lay before it.

This fort had once been a summer-house, but it had long since been
disused, and would, no doubt, have fallen into decay, had not the
children hit upon the idea of making it the scene of their pitched
battles, and had so propped it up and strengthened it that it was
impossible to take except by surprise.

The door had been nailed up and so had the window, and entrance could
only be effected by scrambling up on the flat roof, and dropping
through a hole which had been made there for that purpose. Even that
hole could be closed by a hatch in time of need, and the besieged could
lie snugly inside and listen to the heavy firing without, secure in the
knowledge that as long as he chose to remain there none of the
besiegers could touch hi