'It seems silly, though,' said Alice, 'because the lunatic or the bear or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard the keepers coming, if he didn't happen to want to show off just then.' This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was never untwisted. 'Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,' said Alice, 'and they did not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.' It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' We often wondered who Mrs. S. was. 'Let's have a regular round of gaieties,' said Oswald. 'Each of us to take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the others look through the bars.' So next day we did this. Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of Mrs. S., but Noel and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the part of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of low degree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady. Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to pretend to be beaten, which was not the case. Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved yard. Noel was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, and he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door open, which was most unfair. H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him. It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after brushing the flour out of Noel's hair in the back-garden that Oswald said: '_I_ know what that room was made for.' And everyone said, 'What?' which is not manners, but your brothers and sisters do not mind because it saves time. 'Why, _coiners_,' said Oswald. 'Don't you see? They kept a sentinel at the door, that _is_ a door, and if anyone approached he whispered "_Cave_."' 'But why have iron bars?' 'In extra safety,' said Oswald; 'and if their nefarious fires were not burning he need not say "_Cave_" at all. It's no use saying anything for nothing.' It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.