pan
out of the moat that dropped through where he mended it. Dora, Oswald,
Dicky and me got upset in the moat. This was not goodness. Dora's foot
was hurt. We hope to do better next time.'"

Then came Noel's poem:

"'We are the Wouldbegoods Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try.
And if we try, and if we don't succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.'"

This sounded so much righter than Noel's poetry generally does, that
Oswald said so, and Noel explained that Denny had helped him.

"He seems to know the right length for lines of poetry. I suppose it
comes of learning so much at school," Noel said.

Then Oswald proposed that anybody should be allowed to write in the book
if they found out anything good that any one else had done, but not
things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about themselves,
or anything other people told them, only what they found out.

After a brief jaw the others agreed, and Oswald felt, not for the first
time in his young life, that he would have made a good diplomatic hero
to carry despatches and outwit the other side. For now he had put it out
of the minute-book's power to be the kind of thing readers of
_Ministering Children_ would have wished.

"And if any one tells other people any good thing he's done he is to go
to Coventry for the rest of the day." And Denny remarked, "We shall do
good by stealth and blush to find it shame."

After that nothing was written in the book for some time. I looked
about, and so did the others, but I never caught any one in the act of
doing anything extra; though several of the others have told me since of
things they did at this time, and really wondered nobody had noticed.

I think I said before, that when you tell a story you cannot tell
everything. It would be silly to do it. Because ordinary kinds of play
are dull to read about; and the only other thing is meals, and to dwell
on what you eat is greedy and not like a hero at all. A hero is always
contented with a venison pasty and a horn of sack. All the same, the
meals _were_ very interesting; with things you do not get at home--Lent
pies with custard and currants in them, sausage rolls, and flede cakes,
and raisin cakes and apple turnovers, and honeycomb and syllabubs,
besides as much new milk as you cared about, and cream now and then, and
cheese always on the table for tea. Father told Mrs. Pettigrew to get
what meals she liked, and she got these str