They got the tree out of the front-door without being seen by the servants--a real triumph. They stood the pot in the barrow, and started to wheel it out of the front-gate. But directly they lifted the handles of the barrow the floor of it naturally ceased to be straight, and the flower-pot toppled over and cracked itself slightly against the side of the barrow, while the boughs of the tree, with their gay decorations, took the opportunity to entangle themselves in the bad-tempered leaves of the holly that stood there, and were disengaged with difficulty. Then the pot refused to stand up, and at last it had to be laid down in the barrow, with its shiny treasures dangling over the front-wheel. Then, the barrow was extremely heavy even without the tree in it; and the children did not go the nearest way to the Grotto, because they did not want to meet people, so they were thoroughly tired and extremely hot by the time they approached Sir Christopher Cockleshell's castle. There was a bit of waste land close to it, where someone had once begun to build a house and had then thought better of it. A bit of this house's wall was standing on each side of the space where its front-door would have been if it had ever come to the point of having one. They wheeled the barrow in, and the light of a street lamp that obligingly shone through the door-space made it possible for them to disentangle the little strings that had got twisted round each other, to disengage the gilt fish from the sugar bird-cage, and to take the glass bird out of the goose-bone armchair in which it was trying to sit. Also they set up all the candles--six dozen of them. This is done with tin-tacks, as no doubt you know. 'Now,' said Guy, 'one of us must go and ask if he'll let us light it in his yard, and one of us must wait here with the tree.' 'What about me?' said Mabel. 'You can do which you like,' said Guy. 'I want to do both,' said Mabel; 'I want to stay with the pretty tree, _and_ I want to go and ask him if he wants us.' Mabel was still too small to understand thoroughly how hard it is, even for a grown-up person, to be in two places at once. It ended in Guy's staying with the tree. 'In case of attacks by boys,' he said. 'Then I shall go with Phyllis,' said Mabel. Both girls felt their hearts go quite pitter-pattery when at last they stood on the doorstep of the castle. 'Why don't you knock?' Mabel asked. 'I don't like to,' said Phyllis. Mabel instantly knocked very loudly with a wooden ninepin-ball that she happened to have in her pocket. 'Oh, I _wish_ you hadn't!' said Phyllis; 'I wanted to think what to say first, and now there's no time.' There certainly was not. The door opened a cautious inch, and a voice said: 'Who's there?'