lace
can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of
perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by
itself in the lane that leads to the mill.

"I wonder whose baby it is," Dora said. "Isn't it a darling, Alice?"

Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely
the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.

"These two, as likely as not," Noel said. "Can't you see something
crime-like in the very way they're lying?"

They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge of
the lane on the shady side, fast asleep, only a very little further on
than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and their snores did
have a sinister sound.

"I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of night, and they've been
travelling hot-foot ever since, so now they're sleeping the sleep of
exhaustedness," Alice said. "What a heartrending scene when the
patrician mother wakes in the morning and finds the infant aristocrat
isn't in bed with his mamma."

The Baby was fast asleep or else the girls would have kissed it. They
are strangely fond of kissing. The author never could see anything in it
himself.

"If the gipsies _did_ steal it," Dora said, "perhaps they'd sell it to
us. I wonder what they'd take for it."

"What could you do with it if you'd got it?" H. O. asked.

"Why, adopt it, of course," Dora said. "I've often thought I should
enjoy adopting a baby. It would be a golden deed, too. We've hardly got
any in the book yet."

"I should have thought there were enough of us," Dicky said.

"Ah, but you're none of you babies," said Dora.

"Unless you count H. O. as a baby: he behaves jolly like one sometimes."

This was because of what had happened that morning when Dicky found H.
O. going fishing with a box of worms, and the box was the one Dicky
keeps his silver studs in, and the medal he got at school, and what is
left of his watch and chain. The box is lined with red velvet and it was
not nice afterwards. And then H. O. said Dicky had hurt him, and he was
a beastly bully, and he cried. We thought all this had been made up,
and were sorry to see it threaten to break out again. So Oswald said:

"Oh, bother the Baby! Come along, do!"

And the others came.

We were going to the miller's with a message about some flour that
hadn't come, and about a sack of sharps for the pigs.

After you go down the lane you come to a cloverfield, and then a
cor