"I'll tell you what we will do, Lucy; we will be good all the evening; we will not do one naughty thing."
"So we will, Henry," said Emily. "When John lets us out, how good we will be! and then we can tell the truth, that we were naughty in the morning, but we were good all the evening."
John made some nice apple-dumplings for the children, and when they were ready, and he had put some butter and sugar upon them (for John was a good-natured man), he fetched the children down; and after they had each ate as much apple-dumpling as he thought proper, he told them they might play in the barn, bidding them not to stir out of it till supper-time.
Henry and Lucy and Emily were delighted with this permission; and, as Lucy ran along to the barn with her brother and sister, she said:
"Now let us be very good. We are not to do anything naughty all this evening."
"We will be very good indeed," answered Emily.
"Better than we ever were in all our lives," added Henry.
So they all went into the barn, and when John fastened them in he said to himself, "Sure they will be safe now, till I have looked to the pigs and milked the cow; for there is nothing in the barn but straw and hay, and they cannot hurt themselves with that, sure."
But John was mistaken. As soon as he was gone, Henry spied a swing, which Mr. Fairchild had made in the barn for the children, but which he never allowed them to use when he was not with them, because swings are very dangerous things, unless there are very careful persons to
use them. The seat of the swing was tied up to the side of the barn, above the children's reach, as Mr. Fairchild thought.