The Story of the Treasure Seekers<br />Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a, E. Nesbit [top ten books to read txt] 📗
- Author: E. Nesbit
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Alice won’t lend her gardening tools again, because the last time Noel left them out in the rain, and I don’t like it. He said he didn’t.
—————— SEEDS AND BULBSThese are useful to play at shop with, until you are ready. Not at dinner-parties, for they will not grow unless uncooked. Potatoes are not grown with seed, but with chopped-up potatoes. Apple trees are grown from twigs, which is less wasteful.
Oak trees come from acorns. Every one knows this. When Noel says he could grow one from a peach stone wrapped up in oak leaves, he shows that he knows nothing about gardening but marigolds, and when I passed by his garden I thought they seemed just like weeds now the flowers have been picked.
A boy once dared me to eat a bulb.
Dogs are very industrious and fond of gardening. Pincher is always planting bones, but they never grow up. There couldn’t be a bone tree. I think this is what makes him bark so unhappily at night. He has never tried planting dog-biscuit, but he is fonder of bones, and perhaps he wants to be quite sure about them first.
—————— SAM REDFERN, OR THE BUSHRANGER’S BURIAL By Dicky —————— CHAPTER IV AND LASTThis would have been a jolly good story if they had let me finish it at the beginning of the paper as I wanted to. But now I have forgotten how I meant it to end, and I have lost my book about Red Indians, and all my Boys of England have been sneaked. The girls say ‘Good riddance!’ so I expect they did it. They want me just to put in which Annie married, but I shan’t, so they will never know.
We have now put everything we can think of into the paper. It takes a lot of thinking about. I don’t know how grown-ups manage to write all they do. It must make their heads ache, especially lesson books.
Albert-next-door only wrote one chapter of the serial story, but he could have done some more if he had wanted to. He could not write out any of the things because he cannot spell. He says he can, but it takes him such a long time he might just as well not be able. There are one or two things more. I am sick of it, but Dora says she will write them in.
LEGAL ANSWER WANTED. A quantity of excellent string is offered if you know whether there really is a law passed about not buying gunpowder under thirteen.—DICKY.
The price of this paper is one shilling each, and sixpence extra for the picture of the Malabar going down with all hands. If we sell one hundred copies we will write another paper.
* * *And so we would have done, but we never did. Albert-next-door’s uncle gave us two shillings, that was all. You can’t restore fallen fortunes with two shillings!
CHAPTER 9. THE G. B.
Being editors is not the best way to wealth. We all feel this now, and highwaymen are not respected any more like they used to be.
I am sure we had tried our best to restore our fallen fortunes. We felt their fall very much, because we knew the Bastables had been rich once. Dora and Oswald can remember when Father was always bringing nice things home from London, and there used to be turkeys and geese and wine and cigars come by the carrier at Christmas-time, and boxes of candied fruit and French plums in ornamental boxes with silk and velvet and gilding on them. They were called prunes, but the prunes you buy at the grocer’s are quite different. But now there is seldom anything nice brought from London, and the turkey and the prune people have forgotten Father’s address.
‘How can we restore those beastly fallen fortunes?’ said Oswald. ‘We’ve tried digging and writing and princesses and being editors.’
‘And being bandits,’ said H. O.
‘When did you try that?’ asked Dora quickly. ‘You know I told you it was wrong.’
‘It wasn’t wrong the way we did it,’ said Alice, quicker still, before Oswald could say, ‘Who asked you to tell us anything about it?’ which would have been rude, and he is glad he didn’t. ‘We only caught Albert-next-door.’
‘Oh, Albert-next-door!’ said Dora contemptuously, and I felt more comfortable; for even after I didn’t say, ‘Who asked you, and cetera,’ I was afraid Dora was going to come the good elder sister over us. She does that a jolly sight too often.
Dicky looked up from the paper he was reading and said, ‘This sounds likely,’ and he read out—
‘L100 secures partnership in lucrative business for sale of useful patent. L10 weekly. No personal attendance necessary. Jobbins, 300, Old Street Road.’‘I wish we could secure that partnership,’ said Oswald. He is twelve, and a very thoughtful boy for his age.
Alice looked up from her painting. She was trying to paint a fairy queen’s frock with green bice, and it wouldn’t rub. There is something funny about green bice. It never will rub off; no matter how expensive your paintbox is—and even boiling water is very little use.
She said, ‘Bother the bice! And, Oswald, it’s no use thinking about that. Where are we to get a hundred pounds?’
‘Ten pounds a week is five pounds to us,’ Oswald went on—he had done the sum in his head while Alice was talking—‘because partnership means halves. It would be A1.’
Noel sat sucking his pencil—he had been writing poetry as usual. I saw the first two lines—
I wonder why Green Bice Is never very nice.Suddenly he said, ‘I wish a fairy would come down the chimney and drop a jewel on the table—a jewel worth just a hundred pounds.’
‘She might as well give you the hundred pounds while she was about it,’ said Dora.
‘Or while she was about it she might as well give us five pounds a week,’ said Alice.
‘Or fifty,’ said I.
‘Or five hundred,’ said Dicky.
I saw H. O. open his mouth, and I knew he was going to say, ‘Or five thousand,’ so I said—
‘Well, she won’t give us fivepence, but if you’d only do as I am always saying, and rescue a wealthy old gentleman from deadly peril he would give us a pot of money, and we could have the partnership and five pounds
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