Dora and a sofa had been carried out on to the lawn, and we were on the grass. It was very hot and dry. We had sherbet. Alice read:
"'Society of the Wouldbegoods.
"'We have not done much. Dicky mended a window, and we got the milk-pan out of the moat that dropped through where he mended it. Dora, Oswald, Dicky and me got upset in the moat. This was not goodness. Dora's foot was hurt. We hope to do better next time.'"
Then came Noël's poem:
"'We are the Wouldbegoods Society,
We are not good yet, but we mean to try.
And if we try, and if we don't succeed,
It must mean we are very bad indeed.'"
This sounded so much righter than Noël's poetry generally does, that Oswald said so, and Noël explained that Denny had helped him.
"He seems to know the right length for lines of poetry. I suppose it comes of learning so much at school," Noël said.
Then Oswald proposed that anybody should be allowed to write in the book if they found out anything good that any one else had done, but not things that were public acts; and nobody was to write about themselves, or anything other people told them, only what they found out.
After a brief jaw the others agreed, and Oswald felt, not for the first time in his young life, that he would have made a good diplomatic hero to carry despatches and outwit the other side. For now he had put it out of the minute-book's power to be the kind of thing readers of Ministering Children would have wished.
"And if any one tells other people any good thing he's done he is to go to Coventry for the rest of the day." And Denny remarked, "We shall do good by stealth and blush to find it shame."