Being the Further Adventures of The Treasure Seekers
“We are the Bastables—Oswald, Dora, Dicky, Alice, Noel, and h. o. If you want to know why we call our youngest brother h. o. you can jolly well read
The Treasure Seekers,
and find out. We were the Treasure Seekers, and we sought it high and low, and quite regularly, because we particularly wanted to find it. And at last we did not find it, but we were found by a good, kind Indian uncle, who helped Father with his business, so that Father was able to take us all to live in a jolly big red house on Blackheath, instead of in the Lewisham Road, where we lived when we were only poor but honest Treasure Seekers.”
In this second novel about the Bastable children, the former Treasure Seekers are joined by the Robber’s two children, Daisy and Denny. The eight children manage to unintentionally get themselves into a major scrape in the very first chapter:
“We had no clothes on to speak of—I mean us boys. We were all wet through. Daisy was in a faint or a fit, or dead, none of us then knew which. And all the stuffed animals were there staring the uncle in the face. Most of them had got a sprinkling, and the otter and the duck-bill brute were simply soaked. And three of us were dark brown. Concealment, as so often happens, was impossible.”
Consequently, they are all exiled to the country home of Albert-Next-Door’s Uncle, there to stay until they “had grown into better children.”
The rest of the novel relates all of the (mis)adventures the children stumble into in their quest to be good.
Caution:
Chapter 5 contains one instance of the offensive “n” word to describe how hard the children are working.
