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СКАЧАТЬ rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_eb51dfef-bad8-5569-b782-3e6d94f33ce4.png" alt="image"/> THE LUNCH WAS A BLISSFUL DREAM OF A.1.-NESS.

      There was no restrainingness about that lunch. As far as a married lady can possibly be a regular brick, Mrs. Red House is one. And Mr. Red House is not half bad, and knows how to talk about interesting things like sieges, and cricket, and foreign postage stamps.

      Even poets think of things sometimes, and it was Noël who said directly he had finished his poetry,

      "Have you got a secret staircase? And have you explored your house properly?"

      "Yes—we have," said that well-behaved and unusual lady—Mrs. Red House, "but you haven't. You may if you like. Go anywhere," she added with the unexpected magnificence of a really noble heart. "Look at everything—only don't make hay. Off with you!" or words to that effect.

      And the whole of us, with proper thanks, offed with us instantly, in case she should change her mind.

      I will not describe the Red House to you—because perhaps you do not care about a house having three staircases and more cupboards and odd corners than we'd ever seen before, and great attics with beams, and enormous drawers on rollers, let into the wall—and half the rooms not furnished, and those that were all with old-looking, interesting furniture. There was something about that furniture that even the present author can't describe—as though any of it might have secret drawers or panels—even the chairs. It was all beautiful, and mysterious in the deepest degree.

      When we had been all over the house several times, we thought about the cellars. There was only one servant in the kitchen (so we saw Mr. and Mrs. Red House must be poor but honest, like we used to be), and we said to her—

      "How do you do? We've got leave to go wherever we like, and please where are the cellars, and may we go in?"

      She was quite nice, though she seemed to think there was an awful lot of us. People often think this. She said:

      "Lor, love a duck—yes, I suppose so," in not ungentle tones, and showed us.

      I don't think we should ever have found the way from the house into the cellar by ourselves. There was a wide shelf in the scullery with a row of gentlemanly boots on it that had been cleaned, and on the floor in front a piece of wood. The general servant—for such indeed she proved to be—lifted up the wood and opened a little door under the shelf. And there was the beginning of steps, and the entrance to them was half trap-door, and half the upright kind—a thing none of us had seen before.

      She gave us a candle-end, and we pressed forward to the dark unknown. The stair was of stone, arched overhead like churches—and it twisted most unlike other cellar stairs. And when we got down it was all arched like vaults, very cobwebby.

      "Just the place for crimes," said Dicky. There was a beer cellar, and a wine cellar with bins, and a keeping cellar with hooks in the ceiling and stone shelves—just right for venison pasties and haunches of the same swift animal.

      Then we opened a door and there was a cellar with a well in it.

      "To throw bodies down, no doubt," Oswald explained.

      They were cellars full of glory, and passages leading from one to the other like the Inquisition, and I wish ours at home were like them.

      There was a pile of beer barrels in the largest cellar, and it was H.O. who said, "Why not play 'King of the Castle?'"

      So we did. We had a most refreshing game. It was exactly like Denny to be the one who slipped down behind the barrels, and did not break a single one of all his legs or arms.

      "No," he cried, in answer to our anxious inquiries. "I'm not hurt a bit, but the wall here feels soft—at least not soft—but it doesn't scratch your nails like stone does, so perhaps it's the door of a secret dungeon or something like that."

      "Good old Dentist!" replied Oswald, who always likes Denny to have ideas of his own, because it was us who taught him the folly of white-mousishness.

      "It might be," he went on, "but these barrels are as heavy as lead, and much more awkward to collar hold of."

      "Couldn't we get in some other way?" Alice said. "There ought to be a subterranean passage. I expect there is if we only knew."

      Oswald has an enormous geographical bump in his head. He said—

      "Look here! That far cellar, where the wall doesn't go quite up to the roof—that space we made out was under the dining-room—I could creep under there. I believe it leads into behind this door."

      "Get me out! Oh do, do get me out, and let me come!" shouted the barrel-imprisoned Dentist from the unseen regions near the door.

      So we got him out by Oswald lying flat on his front on the top barrel, and the Dentist clawed himself up by Oswald's hands while the others kept hold of the boots of the representative of the house of Bastable, which, of course, Oswald is, whenever Father is not there.

      "Come on," cried Oswald, when Denny was at last able to appear, very cobwebby and black. "Give us what's left of the matches!"

      The others agreed to stand by the barrels and answer our knocking on the door if we ever got there.

      "But I daresay we shall perish on the way," said Oswald hopefully.

      So we started. The other cellar was easily found by the ingenious and geography-bump-headed Oswald. It opened straight on to the moat, and we think it was a boathouse in middle-aged times.

      Denny made a back for Oswald, who led the way, and then he turned round and hauled up his inexperienced, but rapidly improving, follower on to the top of the wall that did not go quite up to the roof.

      "It is like coal mines," he said, beginning to crawl on hands and knees over what felt like very prickly beach, "only we've no picks or shovels."

      "And no Sir Humphry Davy safety lamps," said Denny in sadness.

      "They wouldn't be any good," said Oswald; "they're only to protect the hard-working mining men against fire-damp and choke-damp. And there's none of those kinds here."

      "No," said Denny, "the damp here is only just the common kind."

      "Well, then," said Oswald, and they crawled a bit further still on their furtive and unassuming stomachs.

      "This is a very glorious adventure. It is, isn't it?" inquired the Dentist in breathlessness, when the young stomachs of the young explorers had bitten the dust for some yards further.

      "Yes," said Oswald, encouraging the boy, "and it's your find, too," he added, with admirable fairness and justice, unusual in one so young. "I only hope we shan't find a mouldering skeleton buried alive behind that door when we get to it. Come on. What are you stopping for now?" he added kindly.

      "It's—it's only cobwebs in my throat," Denny remarked, and he came on, though slower than before.

      Oswald, with his customary intrepid caution, was leading the way, and he paused every now and then to strike a match because it was pitch dark, and at any moment the courageous leader might have tumbled into a well or a dungeon, or knocked his dauntless nose against something in the dark.

      "It's all right for you," he said СКАЧАТЬ