ring; but perhaps
sherry ought to be like that.'

Then it was Oswald's turn. He thought it was very burny; but he said
nothing. He wanted to see first what the others would say.

Dicky said his was simply beastly, and Alice said Noel could taste next
if he liked.

Noel said it was the golden wine of the gods, but he had to put his
handkerchief up to his mouth all the same, and I saw the face he made.

Then H. O. had his, and he spat it out in the fire, which was very rude
and nasty, and we told him so.

Then it was Alice's turn. She said, 'Only half a teaspoonful for me,
Dora. We mustn't use it all up.' And she tasted it and said nothing.

Then Dicky said: 'Look here, I chuck this. I'm not going to hawk round
such beastly stuff. Any one who likes can have the bottle. Quis?'

And Alice got out 'Ego' before the rest of us. Then she said, 'I know
what's the matter with it. It wants sugar.'

And at once we all saw that that was all there was the matter with the
stuff. So we got two lumps of sugar and crushed it on the floor with one
of the big wooden bricks till it was powdery, and mixed it with some of
the wine up to the tablespoon mark, and it was quite different, and not
nearly so nasty.

'You see it's all right when you get used to it,' Dicky said. I think he
was sorry he had said 'Quis?' in such a hurry.

'Of course,' Alice said, 'it's rather dusty. We must crush the sugar
carefully in clean paper before we put it in the bottle.'

Dora said she was afraid it would be cheating to make one bottle nicer
than what people would get when they ordered a dozen bottles, but Alice
said Dora always made a fuss about everything, and really it would be
quite honest.

'You see,' she said, 'I shall just tell them, quite truthfully, what
we have done to it, and when their dozens come they can do it for
themselves.'

So then we crushed eight more lumps, very cleanly and carefully between
newspapers, and shook it up well in the bottle, and corked it up with a
screw of paper, brown and not news, for fear of the poisonous printing
ink getting wet and dripping down into the wine and killing people. We
made Pincher have a taste, and he sneezed for ever so long, and after
that he used to go under the sofa whenever we showed him the bottle.

Then we asked Alice who she would try and sell it to. She said: 'I shall
ask everybody who comes to the house. And while we are doing that, we
can be thinking of outside people to take it