Many of us groaned, and one said, "Hear! hear!" I will not say which one, but it was not Oswald.
"No, but really," Dora said, "I don't want to be preachy—but you know we did say we'd try to be good. And it says in a book I was reading only yesterday that not being naughty is not enough. You must be good. And we've hardly done anything. The Golden Deed book's almost empty."
"Couldn't we have a book of leaden deeds," said Noël, coming out of his poetry, "then there'd be plenty for Alice to write about if she wants to, or brass or zinc or aluminium deeds? We sha'n't ever fill the book with golden ones."
H. O. had rolled himself in the red table-cloth, and said Noël was only advising us to be naughty, and again peace waved in the balance. But Alice said, "Oh, H. O., don't—he didn't mean that; but really and truly, I wish wrong things weren't so interesting. You begin to do a noble act, and then it gets so exciting, and before you know where you are you are doing something wrong as hard as you can lick."
"And enjoying it too," Dicky said.
"It's very curious," Denny said, "but you don't seem to be able to be certain inside yourself whether what you're doing is right if you happen to like doing it, but if you don't like doing it you know quite well. I only thought of that just now. I wish Noël would make a poem about it."
"I am," Noël said; "it began about a crocodile, but it is finishing itself up quite different from what I meant it to at first. Just wait a minute."
He wrote very hard while his kind brothers and sisters and his little friends waited the minute he had said, and then he read:
"The crocodile is very wise,
He lives in the Nile with little eyes,
He eats the hippopotamus too,
And if he could he would eat up you.
"The lovely woods and starry skies
He looks upon with glad surprise;
He sees the riches of the east,
And the tiger and lion, kings of beast.