THE WOULDBEGOODS
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,
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