LITMIR.BIZ

      The Intrepid Explorer And His Lieutenant

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      We had spectacles to play antiquaries in, and the rims were vaselined to prevent rust, and it came off on our faces with other kinds of dirt, and when the antiquary game was over, Mrs. Red House helped us to wash it off with all the thoroughness of aunts, and far more gentleness.

      Then, clean and with our hairs brushed, we were led from the bath-room to the banqueting hall or dining-room.

      It is a very beautiful house. The girls thought it was bare, but Oswald likes bareness because it leaves more room for games. All the furniture was of agreeable shapes and colours, and so were all the things on the table—glasses and dishes and everything. Oswald politely said how nice everything was.

      The lunch was a blissful dream of perfect A.1.-ness. Tongue, and nuts, and apples, and oranges, and candied fruits, and ginger-wine in tiny glasses that Noël said were fairy goblets. Everybody drank everybody else's health—and Noël told Mrs. Red House just how lovely she was, and he would have paper and pencil and write her a poem for her very own. I will not put it in here, because Mr. Red House is an author himself, and he might want to use it in some of his books. And the writer of these pages has been taught to think of others, and besides I expect you are jolly well sick of Noël's poetry.

       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

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