THE WOULDBEGOODS
"How horrid!" Alice said. "Do let's get home."
"We may as well go to the top," Dicky said, "just to say we've been."
And Alice is no funk—so she agreed; though I could see she did not like it.
Up at the top it was like the top of the church tower, only octagenarian in shape, instead of square.
Alice got all right there; because you cannot think much about ghosts and nonsense when the sun is shining bang down on you at four o'clock in the afternoon, and you can see red farm-roofs between the trees, and the safe white roads, with people in carts like black ants crawling.
It was very jolly, but we felt we ought to be getting back, because tea is at five, and we could not hope to find lifts both ways.
So we started to go down. Dicky went first, then Oswald, then Alice—and H. O. had just stumbled over the top step and saved himself by Alice's back, which nearly upset Oswald and Dicky, when the hearts of all stood still, and then went on by leaps and bounds, like the good work in missionary magazines.
For, down below us, in the tower where the man whose beard grew down to his toes after he was dead was buried, there was a noise—a loud noise. And it was like a door being banged and bolts fastened. We tumbled over each other to get back into the open sunshine on the top of the tower, and Alice's hand got jammed between the
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