Noel was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying to write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that he could think about rhymes. We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard Noel say: 'Hist! Hide the plant!' We didn't take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done to play a game of misers, which was Alice's idea. 'Hist!' Noel said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: 'It's a _real_ hist! I tell you there's someone on the stairs.' And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with the key labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door. We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear Oswald's heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days of unexplained idleness. If we _did_ have to pay for finding the Enchanceried House, this was when we paid. There _were_ feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The author distinctly heard the words 'replete with every modern inconvenience,' and 'pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and rail.' And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had got itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it. We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us. The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, and stopped at the door. 'This is the nursery,' said a manly voice. 'Ah, locked! I quite understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.' Of course _we_ had the keys, and this was the moment that Noel chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap--Virgil or Lucretius--that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never forget. There was an awful silence--quite a long one. Then another voice said: 'There's someone in there.' 'Look at that bench,' said the other man; 'it's coiners' work, that's what it is, but there's nobody there. The keys must have _blown_ down!' The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all their conversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, what exactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew we were trespassers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that we were not real coiners. 'No,' we heard one of them say, 'if we go for the police very likely the gang will return and destroy everything. There's no one here now. Let's secure the evidence. We can easily break the door down.'