door shut.'

Then at once we saw. And we agreed to get up the very next day,
ere yet the rosy dawn had flushed the east, and have a go at Mrs
Simpkins's garden.

We got up. We really did. But too often when you mean to,
overnight, it seems so silly to do it when you come to waking in
the dewy morn. We crept downstairs with our boots in our hands.
Denny is rather unlucky, though a most careful boy. It was he who
dropped his boot, and it went blundering down the stairs, echoing
like thunderbolts, and waking up Albert's uncle. But when we
explained to him that we were going to do some gardening he let us,
and went back to bed.

Everything is very pretty and different in the early morning,
before people are up. I have been told this is because the shadows
go a different way from what they do in the awake part of the day.
But I don't know. Noel says the fairies have just finished tidying
up then. Anyhow it all feels quite otherwise.

We put on our boots in the porch, and we got our gardening tools
and we went down to the white cottage. It is a nice cottage, with
a thatched roof, like in the drawing copies you get at girls'
schools, and you do the thatch--if you can--with a B.B. pencil. If
you cannot, you just leave it. It looks just as well, somehow,
when it is mounted and framed.

We looked at the garden. It was very neat. Only one patch was
coming up thick with weeds. I could see groundsel and chickweed,