H. O. His real name is Horace Octavius, but we call him H. O. because of
the advertisement, and it's not so very long ago he was afraid to pass
the hoarding where it says 'Eat H. O.' in big letters. He says it was
when he was a little boy, but I remember last Christmas but one, he woke
in the middle of the night crying and howling, and they said it was the
pudding. But he told me afterwards he had been dreaming that they
really _had_ come to eat H. O., and it couldn't have been the pudding,
when you come to think of it, because it was so very plain.

Well, we made it half an hour--and we all sat quiet, and thought and
thought. And I made up my mind before two minutes were over, and I saw
the others had, all but Dora, who is always an awful time over
everything. I got pins and needles in my leg from sitting still so
long, and when it was seven minutes H. O. cried out--'Oh, it must be
more than half an hour!'

H. O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could
tell the clock when he was six.

We all stretched ourselves and began to speak at once, but Dora put up
her hands to her ears and said--

'One at a time, please. We aren't playing Babel.' (It is a very good
game. Did you ever play it?)

So Dora made us all sit in a row on the floor, in ages, and then she
pointed at us with the finger that had the brass thimble on. Her silver
one got lost when the last General but two went away. We think she must
have forgotten it was Dora's and put it in her box by mistake. She was
a very forgetful girl. She used to forget what she had spent money on,