Page:Nine Unlikely Tales.djvu/267

Rh with them. So Fabian and Rosamund stuck bits of candied apricot and fig and pear and cherry and beetroot on the tops of the soldiers’ bayonets, and when every soldier had a piece they put a fat candied cherry on the officer’s sword. Then the children knew the soldiers would be quiet for a few minutes, and they ran back into their own house and into the library to talk to each other about what they had better do, for they both felt that the blue soldiers were a very hard-hearted set of men.

“They might shut us up in the dungeons,” said Rosamund, “and then Mother might lock us in, when she shut up the lid of the bureau, and we should starve to death.”

For they could not be sure exactly what size they were, or which library their Mother would come back to when she had given away all the flannel petticoats and things.

The dungeons were the pigeon-holes of the bureau, and the doors of them were the little “Beauties of Literature”—very heavy doors they were too.

You see the curious thing was that the children had built a town and got into it, and in it they had found their own house with the very town they had built—or one exactly like it—still on the library floor.