When that sort of thing happens, I do feel that I've got a rather nasty temper.
I've begun about losing things, because our adventures had to do with a very big losing. The first adventure came straight from it, and the rest had to do with it.
It's funny how things hang together like that. You think of something that's come, and you remember what made it happen, and then you go back to the beginning of that, and you see it came from something else; and you go on feeling it out like, till you're quite astonished to find what a perfectly different thing had started it all from what you would have thought.
I think this will be a good place for ending the first chapter, which isn't really like a story—only an explanation of us.
And in the next I'll begin about our adventures.
CHAPTER II
THE DIAMOND ORNAMENT
It was two years ago nearly; it was the end of February—no, I think it was a little way on in March. So I was only nine and a quarter, and Anne was about twelve, and all the others in proportion younger than they are now, of course. You can count their ages, if you like, though I don't know who 'you' are, or if there's ever going to be any 'you' at all. But it's the sort of thing I like to do myself when I read a story. I count all the people's ages, and the times they did things, and that things are said to have happened, and I can tell you that very often I find that authors make very stupid mistakes. I told father of this once, and I said I'd like to write and tell them. He laughed, but he called me a prig, which I didn't like, so I never have written to any of them.
That winter began early, and was very cold, but it went early too. So grandfather took it into his head to come back to England the end of February, for a bit, meaning to go on somewhere else—to Ireland, I think, where we have some relations—after he'd been in London a fortnight or so.