It was jolly hot weather, and very stuffy indoors--we used to play a
good deal in the garden. We made a tent out of the kitchen clothes-
horse and some blankets off our beds, and though it was quite as hot in
the tent as in the house it was a very different sort of hotness.
Albert's uncle called it the Turkish Bath. It is not nice to be kept
from the seaside, but we know that we have much to be thankful for. We
might be poor little children living in a crowded alley where even at
summer noon hardly a ray of sunlight penetrates; clothed in rags and
with bare feet--though I do not mind holes in my clothes myself, and
bare feet would not be at all bad in this sort of weather. Indeed we do,
sometimes, when we are playing at things which require it. It was
shipwrecked mariners that day, I remember, and we were all in the
blanket tent. We had just finished eating the things we had saved, at
the peril of our lives, from the st-sinking vessel. They were rather
nice things. Two-pennyworth of coconut candy--it was got in Greenwich,
where it is four ounces a penny--three apples, some macaroni--the
straight sort that is so useful to suck things through--some raw rice,
and a large piece of cold suet pudding that Alice nicked from the larder
when she went to get the rice and macaroni. And when we had finished
some one said--

'I should like to be a detective.'

I wish to be quite fair, but I cannot remember exactly who said it.
Oswald thinks he said it, and Dora says it was Dicky, but Oswald is too
much of a man to quarrel about a little thing like that.

'I should like to be a detective,' said--perhaps it was Dicky, but I
think not--'and find out strange and hidden crimes.'