Conversations about food always make you feel as though it was a very long time since you had had anything to eat. Mrs. Beale had gone home, of course, but we went into the larder. It is a generous larder. No lock, only a big wooden latch that pulls up with a string, like in Red Riding Hood. And the floor is clean damp red brick. It makes ginger-nuts soft if you put the bag on this floor. There was half a rhubarb pie, and there were meat turnovers with potato in them. Mrs. Beale is a thoughtful person, and I know many people much richer that are not nearly so thoughtful. We had a comfortable feast at the kitchen table, standing up to eat, like horses. Then we had to let Noel read us his piece of poetry about the soldier; he wouldn't have slept if we hadn't. It was very long, and it began as I have said, and ended up: 'Poor soldiers, learn a lesson from to-day, It is very wrong to run away; It is better to stay And serve your King and Country--hurray!' Noel owned that Hooray sounded too cheerful for the end of a poem about soldiers with faces like theirs were. 'But I didn't mean it about the soldiers. It was about the King and Country. Half a sec. I'll put that in.' So he wrote: 'P.S.--I do not mean to be unkind, Poor soldiers, to you, so never mind. When I say hurray or sing, It is because I am thinking of my Country and my King.' 'You can't sing Hooray,' said Dicky. So Noel went to bed singing it, which was better than arguing about it, Alice said. But it was noisier as well. Oswald and Dicky always went round the house to see that all the doors were bolted and the shutters up. This is what the head of the house always does, and Oswald is the head when father is not there. There are no shutters upstairs, only curtains. The White House, which is Miss Sandal's house's name, is not in the village, but 'quite a step' from it, as Mrs. Beale says. It is the first house you come to as you come along the road from the marsh. We used to look in the cupboard and under the beds for burglars every night. The girls liked us to, though they wouldn't look themselves, and I don't know that it was much good. If there _is_ a burglar, it's sometimes safer for you not to know it. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to find a burglar, especially as he would be armed to the teeth as likely as not. However, there is not much worth being a burglar about, in houses where the motto is plain living and high thinking, and there never was anyone in the cupboards or under the beds. Then we put out all the lights very carefully in case of fire--all except Noel's. He does not like the dark. He says there are things in it that go away when you light a candle, and however much you talk reason and science to him, it makes no difference at all.