Mother could not stay with the children, because it was Christmas Eve, and on that day a lot of poor old people came up to get their Christmas presents, tea and snuff, and flannel petticoats, and warm capes, and boxes of needles and cottons and things like that. Generally the children helped to give out the presents, but this year Mother was afraid they might be going to have measles themselves, and measles is a nasty forward illness with no manners at all. You can catch it from a person before they know they’ve got it, and if Rosamund and Fabian had been going to have it they might have given it to all the old men and women who came up to get their Christmas presents. And measles is a present no old men or women want to have given them, even at Christmas time, no matter how old they may be. They would not mind brain-fever or a broken heart so much perhaps—because it is more interesting. But no one can think it interesting to have measles, at any rate till you come to the part where they give you jelly and boiled sole. So the children were left alone. Before Mother went away she said— “Look here, dears, you may play with your bricks, or make pictures with your pretty blocks that kind Uncle Thomas gave you, but you must not touch the two top-drawers of the bureau. Now don’t forget. And if you’re good you shall have tea with me, and perhaps there will be cake. Now you _will_ be good, won’t you?” Fabian and Rosamund promised faithfully that they would be _very_ good and that they would not touch the two top-drawers, and Mother went away to see about the flannel petticoats and the tea and snuff and tobacco and things. When the children were left alone, Fabian said— “I am going to be very good, I shall be much more good than Mother expects me to.” “We _won’t_ look in the drawers,” said Rosamund, stroking the shiny top of the bureau. “We won’t even _think_ about the insides of the drawers,” said Fabian. He stroked the bureau too and his fingers left four long streaks on it, because he had been eating toffee. “I suppose,” he said presently, “we may open the two _bottom_ drawers? Mother couldn’t have made a mistake—could she?” So they opened the two bottom drawers just to be sure that Mother hadn’t made a mistake, and to see whether there was anything in the bottom drawers that they ought not to look at. But the bottom drawer of all had only old magazines in it. And the next to the bottom drawer had a lot of papers in it. The children knew at once by the look of the papers that they belonged to Father’s great work about the Domestic Life of the Ancient Druids, and they knew it was not right—or even interesting—to try to read other people’s papers. So they shut the drawers and looked at each other, and Fabian said, “I think it would be right to play with the bricks and the pretty blocks that Uncle Thomas gave us.”