The Story of the Treasure Seekers [antikvár]

Chapter One One day we started to try to look for treasure. You will see that we tried very hard to find it. There are six children in our family, and then there is Father. Our mother is dead. I will not talk about her. We all loved her, so it is difficult to talk about her. We live in Lewisham Road in London. We are the Bastables. Dora is the oldest, then there is Oswald - that's me. Then Dicky is next, then Alice and Noel, who were born at the same time. After them comes Horace Octavius, who is my youngest brother. Everybody calls him H.O. We have a problem. Father lost all his money. His business went wrong. We weren't always poor, but now we are poor. Now we do not have nice things, and Father does not give us money, and all the chairs and plates and things in the house are old. And we do not go to school now. 'Father never tells us that we are poor,' Dora said one day. 'But we all know.' 'We must do something,' said Alice. 'Yes - but what can we do?' asked Dicky. 'Let's read all our books again,' said Noel. 'We'll get a lot of ideas out of them.' Noel wrote poems, and always read books. Then Dicky said, 'Let's be quiet for ten minutes. How can we find treasure? We must each think about that. Then we'll try all our ideas, one after the other.' After ten minutes, we all started to talk at the same time, but Dora told us to be quiet. I spoke first. 'We must save someone from danger. He'll give us a lot of money, because he'll be very happy with us.' 1