The Wouldbegoods by E. Nesbit Page A

see the poor river’s bones,’ Noel said.
    And so you could.
    Stones and mud and dried branches, and here and there an old kettle or a tin pail with no bottom to it, that some bargee had chucked in.
    From walking so much along the river we knew many of the bargees. Bargees are the captains and crews of the big barges that are pulled up and down the river by slow horses. The horses do not swim. They walk on the towing path, with a rope tied to them, and the other end to the barge. So it gets pulled along. The bargees we knew were a good friendly sort, and used to let us go all over the barges when they were in a good temper. They were not at all the sort of bullying, cowardly fiends in human form that the young hero at Oxford fights a crowd of, single-handed, in books.
    The river does not smell nice when its bones are showing. But we went along down, because Oswald wanted to get some cobbler’s wax in Falding village for a bird-net he was making.
    But just above Falding Lock, where the river is narrow and straight, we saw a sad and gloomy sight – a big barge sitting flat on the mud because there was not water enough to float her.
    There was no one on board, but we knew by a red flannel waistcoat that was spread out to dry on top that the barge belonged to friends of ours.
    Then Alice said, ‘They have gone to find the man who turns on the water to fill the pen. I daresay they won’t find him. He’s gone to his dinner, I shouldn’t wonder. What a lovely surprise it would be if they came back to find their barge floating high and dry on a lot of water!
Do
let’s do it. It’s a long time since any of us did a kind action deserving of being put in the Book of Golden Deeds.’
    We had given that name to the minute book of that beastly ‘Society of the Wouldbegoods’. Then you could think of the book if you wanted to without remembering the Society. I always tried to forget both of them.
    Oswald said, ‘But how?
You
don’t know how. And if you did we haven’t got a crowbar.’
    I cannot help telling you that locks are opened with crowbars. You push and push till a thing goes up and the water runs through. It is rather like the little sliding door in the big door of a hen-house.
    ‘I know where the crowbar is,’ Alice said. ‘Dicky and I were down here yesterday when you were su –’ She was going to say sulking, I know, but she remembered manners ere too late so Oswald bears her no malice. She went on: ‘Yesterday, when you were upstairs. And we saw the water-tender open the lock and the weir sluices. It’s quite easy, isn’t it, Dicky?’
    ‘As easy as kiss your hand,’ said Dicky; ‘and what’s more, I know where he keeps the other thing he opens the sluices with. I votes we do.’
    ‘Do let’s, if we can,’ Noel said, ‘and the bargees will bless the names of their unknown benefactors. They might make a song about us, and sing it on winter nights as they pass round the wassail bowl in front of the cabin fire.’
    Noel wanted to very much; but I don’t think it was altogether for generousness, but because he wanted to see how the sluices opened. Yet perhaps I do but wrong the boy.
    We sat and looked at the barge a bit longer, and then Oswald said, well, he didn’t mind going back to the lock and having a look at the crowbars. You see Oswald did not propose this; he did not even care very much about it when Alice suggested it.
    But when we got to Stoneham Lock, and Dicky dragged the two heavy crowbars from among the elder bushes behind a fallen tree, and began to pound away at the sluice of the lock, Oswald felt it would not be manly to stand idly apart. So he took his turn.
    It was very hard work but we opened the lock sluices, and we did not drop the crowbar into the lock either, as I have heard of being done by older and sillier people.
    The water poured through the sluices all green and solid, as if it had been cut with a knife, and where it fell on the water underneath the white foam spread