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“‘I do not quite follow your meaning, dear sister,’ replied the cleverest of her brothers, on whose brow–“

It’s no use. I can’t write like these books. I wonder how the books’ authors can keep it up.

What really happened was that we were all eating black currants in the orchard, out of a cabbage leaf, and Alice said:

“I say, look here, let’s do something. It’s simply silly to waste a day like this. It’s just on eleven. Come on!”

And Oswald said, “Where to?”

This was the beginning of it.

The moat that is all round our house is fed by streams. One of them is a sort of open overflow pipe from a good-sized stream that flows at the other side of the orchard.

It was this stream that Alice meant when she said:

“Why not go and discover the source of the Nile?”

Of course Oswald knows quite well that the source of the real live Egyptian Nile is no longer buried in that mysteriousness where it lurked undisturbed for such a long time. But he was not going to say so. It is a great thing to know when not to say things.

“Why not have it an arctic expedition?” said Dicky; “then we could take an ice-axe and live on blubber and things. Besides, it sounds cooler.”

“Vote! vote!” cried Oswald. So we did.

Oswald, Alice, Noel, and Denny voted for the river of the ibis and the crocodile. Dicky, H. O., and the other girls for the region of perennial winter and rich blubber.

So Alice said, “We can decide as we go. Let’s start, anyway.”

The question of supplies had now to be gone into. Everybody wanted to take something different, and nobody thought the other people’s things would be the slightest use. It is sometimes thus even with grown-up expeditions. So then Oswald, who is equal to the hardest emergency that ever emerged yet, said:

“Let’s each get what we like. The secret storehouse can be the shed in the corner of the stable-yard where we got the door for the raft. Then the captain can decide who’s to take what.”

This was done. You may think it but the work of a moment to fit out an expedition, but this is not so, especially when you know not whether your exploring party is speeding to Central Africa or merely to the world of icebergs and the polar bear.

Dicky wished to take the wood-axe, the coal hammer, a blanket, and a mackintosh.

H. O. brought a large faggot in case we had to light fires, and a pair of old skates he had happened to notice in the box-room, in case the expedition turned out icy.

Noel had nicked a dozen boxes of matches, a spade, and a trowel, and had also obtained–I know not by what means–a jar of pickled onions.

Denny had a walking-stick–we can’t break him of walking with it–a book to read in case he got tired of being a discoverer, a butterfly net and a box with cork in it, a tennis-ball, if we happened to want to play rounders in the pauses of exploring, two towels and an umbrella in the event of camping or if the river got big enough to bathe in or to be fallen into.

Alice had a comforter for Noel in case we got late, a pair of scissors and needle and cotton, two whole candles in case of caves. And she had thoughtfully brought the table-cloth off the small table in the dining-room, so that we could make all the things up into one bundle and take it in turns to carry it.

Oswald had fastened his master mind entirely on grub. Nor had the others neglected this.

All the stores for the expedition were put down on the table-cloth and the corners tied up. Then it was more than even Oswald’s muscley arms could raise from the ground, so we decided not to take it, but only the best-selected grub. The rest we hid in the straw loft, for there are many ups and downs in life, and grub is grub at any time, and so are stores of all kinds. The pickled onions we had to leave, but not forever.