We got the sheet down again when we had tied the torn parts together in a bunch with string, and Oswald was just saying—
‘Now then, my hearties, pull together, pull with a will! One, two, three,’ when suddenly Dora dropped her bit of the sheet with a piercing shriek and cried out—
‘Oh! it’s all wormy at the bottom. I felt them wriggle.’ And she was out of the water almost before the words were out of her mouth.
The other girls all scuttled out too, and they let the sheet go in such a hurry that we had no time to steady ourselves, and one of us went right in, and the rest got wet up to our waistbands. The one who went right in was only H. O.; but Dora made an awful fuss and said it was our fault. We told her what we thought, and it ended in the girls going in with H. O. to change his things. We had some more gooseberries while they were gone. Dora was in an awful wax when she went away, but she is not of a sullen disposition though sometimes hasty, and when they all came back we saw it was all right, so we said—
‘What shall we do now?’
Alice said, ‘I don’t think we need drag any more. It is wormy. I felt it when Dora did. And besides, the milk-pan is sticking a bit of itself out of the water. I saw it through the dairy window.’
‘Couldn’t we get it up with fish-hooks?’ Noel said. But Alice explained that the dairy was now locked up and the key taken out. So then Oswald said—
‘Look here, we’ll make a raft. We should have to do it some time, and we might as well do it now. I saw an old door in that corner stable that they don’t use. You know. The one where they chop the wood.’
We got the door.
We had never made a raft, any of us, but the way to make rafts is better described in books, so we knew what to do.