



Produced by Jo Churcher





THE STORY OF THE TREASURE SEEKERS

by E. Nesbit

Being the adventures of the Bastable children in search of a fortune




TO OSWALD BARRON Without whom this book could never have been written

The Treasure Seekers is dedicated in memory of childhoods identical but
for the accidents of time and space


CONTENTS

     1.  The Council of Ways and Means
     2.  Digging for Treasure
     3.  Being Detectives
     4.  Good Hunting
     5.  The Poet and the Editor
     6.  Noel's Princess
     7.  Being Bandits
     8.  Being Editors
     9.  The G. B.
     10. Lord Tottenham
     11. Castilian Amoroso
     12. The Nobleness of Oswald
     13. The Robber and the Burglar
     14. The Divining-rod
     15. 'Lo, the Poor Indian!'
     16. The End of the Treasure-seeking




CHAPTER 1. THE COUNCIL OF WAYS AND MEANS

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I
think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the
looking.

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the
treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how
beastly it is when a story begins, "'Alas!" said Hildegarde with a deep
sigh, "we must look our last on this ancestral home"'--and then some one
else says something--and you don't know for pages and pages where the
home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home
is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a
large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our
Mother is dead, and if you think we don't care because I don't tell you
much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.
Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald--and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin
prize at his preparatory school--and Dicky is good at sums. Alice
and Noel are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest
brother. It is one of us that tells this story--but I shall not tell you
which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going
on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don't. It was Oswald
who first thought of looking for treasure. Oswald often thinks of very
interesting things. And directly he thought of it he did not keep it
to himself, as some boys would have done, but he told the others, and
said--

'I'll tell you what, we must go and seek for treasure: it is always what
you do to restore the fallen fortunes of your House.'

Dora said it was all very well. She often says that. She was trying to
mend a large hole in one of Noel's stockings. He tore it on a nail when
we were playing shipwrecked mariners on top of the chicken-house the day
H. O. fell off and cut his chin: he has the scar still. Dora is the only
one of us who ever tries to mend anything. Alice tries to make things
sometimes. Once she knitted a red scarf for Noel because his chest
is delicate, but it was much wider at one end than the other, and he
wouldn't wear it. So we used it as a pennon, and it did very well,
because most of our things are black or grey since Mother died; and
scarlet was a nice change. Father does not like you to ask for new
things. That was one way we had of knowing that the fortunes of the
ancient House of Bastable were really fallen. Another way was that there
was no more pocket-money--except a penny now and then to the little
ones, and people did not come to dinner any more, like they used to,
with pretty dresses, driving up in cabs--and the carpets got holes in
them--and when the legs came off things they were not sent to be mended,
and we gave _up_ having the gardener except for the front garden, and
not that very often. And the silver in the big oak plate-chest that is
lined with green baize all went away to the shop to have the dents
and scratches taken out of it, and it never came back. We think Father
hadn't enough money to pay the silver man for taking out the dents and
scratches. The new spoons and forks were yellowy-white, and not so heavy
as the old ones, and they never shone after the first day or two.

Father was very ill after Mother died; and while he was ill his
business-partner went to Spain--and there was never much money
afterwards. I don't know why. Then the servants left and there was only
one, a General. A great deal of your comfort and happiness depends on
having a good General. The last but one was nice: she used to make jolly
good currant puddings for us, and let us have the dish on the floor
and pretend it was a wild boar we were killing with our forks. But the
General we have now nearly always makes sago puddings, and they are
the watery kind, and you cannot pretend anything with them, not even
islands, like you do with porridge.

Then we left off going to school, and Father said we should go to a good
school as soon as he could manage it. He said a holiday would do us all
good. We thought he was right, but we wished he had told us he couldn't
afford it. For of course we knew.

Then a great many people used to come to the door with envelopes with
no stamps on them, and sometimes they got very angry, and said they
were calling for the last time before putting it in other hands. I asked
Eliza what that meant, and she kindly explained to me, and I was so
sorry for Father.

And once a long, blue paper came; a policeman brought it, and we were
so frightened. But Father said it was all right, only when he went up
to kiss the girls after they were in bed they said he had been crying,
though I'm sure that's not true. Because only cowards and snivellers
cry, and my Father is the bravest man in the world.

So you see it was time we looked for treasure and Oswald said so, and
Dora said it was all very well. But the others agreed with Oswald. So we
held a council. Dora was in the chair--the big dining-room chair, that
we let the fireworks off from, the Fifth of November when we had the
measles and couldn't do it in the garden. The hole has never been
mended, so now we have that chair in the nursery, and I think it was
cheap at the blowing-up we boys got when the hole was burnt.

'We must do something,' said Alice, 'because the exchequer is empty.'
She rattled the money-box as she spoke, and it really did rattle because
we always keep the bad sixpence in it for luck.

'Yes--but what shall we do?' said Dicky. 'It's so jolly easy to say
let's do _something_.' Dicky always wants everything settled exactly.
Father calls him the Definite Article.

'Let's read all the books again. We shall get lots of ideas out of
them.' It was Noel who suggested this, but we made him shut up, because
we knew well enough he only wanted to get back to his old books. Noel
is a poet. He sold some of his poetry once--and it was printed, but that
does not come in this part of the story.

Then Dicky said, 'Look here. We'll be quite quiet for ten minutes by
the clock--and each think of some way to find treasure. And when we've
thought we'll try all the ways one after the other, beginning with the
eldest.'

'I shan't be able to think in ten minutes, make it half an hour,' said
H. O. His real name is Horace Octavius, but we call him H. O. because of
the advertisement, and it's not so very long ago he was afraid to pass
the hoarding where it says 'Eat H. O.' in big letters. He says it was
when he was a little boy, but I remember last Christmas but one, he woke
in the middle of the night crying and howling, and they said it was the
pudding. But he told me afterwards he had been dreaming that they really
_had_ come to eat H. O., and it couldn't have been the pudding, when you
come to think of it, because it was so very plain.

Well, we made it half an hour--and we all sat quiet, and thought and
thought. And I made up my mind before two minutes were over, and I
saw the others had, all but Dora, who is always an awful time over
everything. I got pins and needles in my leg from sitting still so long,
and when it was seven minutes H. O. cried out--'Oh, it must be more than
half an hour!'

H. O. is eight years old, but he cannot tell the clock yet. Oswald could
tell the clock when he was six.

We all stretched ourselves and began to speak at once, but Dora put up
her hands to her ears and said--

'One at a time, please. We aren't playing Babel.' (It is a very good
game. Did you ever play it?)

So Dora made us all sit in a row on the floor, in ages, and then she
pointed at us with the finger that had the brass thimble on. Her silver
one got lost when the last General but two went away. We think she must
have forgotten it was Dora's and put it in her box by mistake. She was a
very forgetful girl. She used to forget what she had spent money on, so
that the change was never quite right.

Oswald spoke first. 'I think we might stop people on Blackheath--with
crape masks and horse-pistols--and say "Your money or your life!
Resistance is useless, we are armed to the teeth"--like Dick Turpin
and Claude Duval. It wouldn't matter about not having horses, because
coaches have gone out too.'

Dora screwed up her nose the way she always does when she is going to
talk like the good elder sister in books, and said, 'That would be
very wrong: it's like pickpocketing or taking pennies out of Father's
great-coat when it's hanging in the hall.'

I must say I don't think she need have said that, especially before the
little ones--for it was when I was only four.

But Oswald was not going to let her see he cared, so he said--

'Oh, very well. I can think of lots of other ways. We could rescue an
old gentleman from deadly Highwaymen.'

'There aren't any,' said Dora.

'Oh, well, it's all the same--from deadly peril, then. There's plenty
of that. Then he would turn out to be the Prince of Wales, and he would
say, "My noble, my cherished preserver! Here is a million pounds a year.
Rise up, Sir Oswald Bastable."'

But the others did not seem to think so, and it was Alice's turn to say.

She said, 'I think we might try the divining-rod. I'm sure I could do
it. I've often read about it. You hold a stick in your hands, and when
you come to where there is gold underneath the stick kicks about. So you
know. And you dig.'

'Oh,' said Dora suddenly, 'I have an idea