explained that the dairy was now locked up and the key taken out.
So then Oswald said--

'Look here, we'll make a raft. We should have to do it some time,
and we might as well do it now. I saw an old door in that corner
stable that they don't use. You know. The one where they chop the
wood.'

We got the door.

We had never made a raft, any of us, but the way to make rafts is
better described in books, so we knew what to do.

We found some nice little tubs stuck up on the fence of the farm
garden, and nobody seemed to want them for anything just then, so
we took them. Denny had a box of tools someone had given him for
his last birthday; they were rather rotten little things, but the
gimlet worked all right, so we managed to make holes in the edges
of the tubs and fasten them with string under the four corners of
the old door. This took us a long time. Albert's uncle asked us
at dinner what we had been playing at, and we said it was a secret,
and it was nothing wrong. You see we wished to atone for Dicky's
mistake before anything more was said. The house has no windows in
the side that faces the orchard.

The rays of the afternoon sun were beaming along the orchard grass
when at last we launched the raft. She floated out beyond reach
with the last shove of the launching. But Oswald waded out and
towed her back; he is not afraid of worms. Yet if he had known of
the other things that were in the bottom of that moat he would have