We were each to have a stall. Dora took the refreshment stall. The uncle made Miss Blake get all that ready.
Alice had a stall for pincushions and brush-and-comb bags, and other useless things that girls make with stuff and ribbons.
Noël had a poetry stall, where you could pay twopence and get a piece of poetry and a sweet wrapped up in it. We chose sugar almonds, because they are not so sticky.
H. O.'s stall was to be sweets, if he promised on his word of honour as a Bastable only to eat one of each kind.
Dicky wished to have a stall for mechanical toys and parts of clocks. He has a great many parts of clocks, but the only mechanical toy was his clockwork engine, that was broken ages ago, so he had to give it up, and he couldn't think of anything else. So he settled to help Oswald, and keep an eye on H. O.
Oswald's stall was meant to be a stall for really useful things, but in the end it was just a lumber stall for the things other people did not want. But he did not mind, because the others agreed he should have the entire selling of the Goat, and he racked his young brains to think how to sell it in the most interesting and unusual way. And at last he saw how, and he said:
'He shall be a lottery, and we'll make people take tickets, and then draw a secret number out of a hat, and whoever gets the right number gets the Goat. I wish it was me.'
'We ought to advertise it, though,' Dicky said. 'Have handbills printed, and send out sandwich-men.'
Oswald inquired at the printers in Greenwich, and handbills were an awful price, and sandwich-men a luxury far beyond our means. So he went home sadly; and then Alice thought of the printing-press. We got it out, and cleaned it where the ink had been upset into it, and mended the broken parts as well as we could, and got some more printers' ink, and wrote the circular and printed it. It was:
SECRET LOTTERY. EXCEPTIONABLE AND RARE CHANCE. _An Object of Value--_
'It ought to be object of _virtue_,' said Dicky. 'I saw it in the old iron and china and picture shop. It was a carved ivory ship, and there was a ticket on it: "Rare Object of Virtue."'
'The Goat's an object, certainly,' Alice said, 'and it's valuable. As for virtue, I'm not so sure.'