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“Fetch all the tools out of your chest–Dicky go too, there’s a good chap, and don’t let him cut his legs with the saw.” He did once, tumbling over it. “Meet us at the cross-roads, you know, where we had the Benevolent Bar. Courage and despatch, and look sharp about it.”

When they had gone we hastened to the cross-roads, and there a great idea occurred to Oswald. He used the forces at his command so ably that in a very short time the board in the field which says “No thoroughfare. Trespassers will be prosecuted” was set up in the middle of the road to Maidstone. We put stones, from a heap by the road, behind it to make it stand up.

Then Dicky and Denny came back, and Dicky shinned up the sign-post and sawed off the two arms, and we nailed them up wrong, so that it said “To Maidstone” on the Dover Road, and “To Dover” on the road to Maidstone. We decided to leave the Trespassers board on the real Maidstone road, as an extra guard.

Then we settled to start at once to warn Maidstone.

Some of us did not want the girls to go, but it would have been unkind to say so. However, there was at least one breast that felt a pang of joy when Dora and Daisy gave out that they would rather stay where they were and tell anybody who came by which was the real road.

“Because it would be so dreadful if some one was going to buy pigs or fetch a doctor or anything in a hurry and then found they had got to Dover instead of where they wanted to go to,” Dora said. But when it came to dinner-time they went home, so that they were entirely out of it. This often happens to them by some strange fatalism.

We left Martha to take care of the two girls, and Lady and Pincher went with us. It was getting late in the day, but I am bound to remember no one said anything about their dinners, whatever they may have thought. We cannot always help our thoughts. We happened to know it was roast rabbits and currant jelly that day.

We walked two and two, and sang the “British Grenadiers” and “Soldiers of the Queen” so as to be as much part of the British army as possible. The Cauldron-Man had said the English were the other side of the hill. But we could not see any scarlet anywhere, though we looked for it as carefully as if we had been fierce bulls.

But suddenly we went round a turn in the road and came plump into a lot of soldiers. Only they were not red-coats. They were dressed in gray and silver. And it was a sort of furzy-common place, and three roads branching out. The men were lying about, with some of their belts undone, smoking pipes and cigarettes.

“It’s not British soldiers,” Alice said. “Oh, dear, oh, dear, I’m afraid it’s more enemy. You didn’t sow the army-seed anywhere else, did you, H. O., dear?”

H. O. was positive he hadn’t. “But perhaps lots more came up where we did sow them,” he said; “they’re all over England by now, very likely. I don’t know how many men can grow out of one dragon’s tooth.”

Then Noel said, “It was my doing, anyhow, and I’m not afraid,” and he walked straight up to the nearest soldier, who was cleaning his pipe with a piece of grass, and said:

“Please, are you the enemy?” The man said:

“No, young commander-in-chief, we’re the English.”

Then Oswald took command.

“Where is the general?” he said.

“We’re out of generals just now, field-marshal,” the man said, and his voice was a gentleman’s voice. “Not a single one in stock. We might suit you in majors now–and captains are quite cheap. Competent corporals going for a song. And we have a very nice colonel, too–quiet to ride or drive.”