When the game had begun, and all the children—­except the biggest girl, who was standing in a corner, with her hands before her face, counting as fast as she could, and hoping that she would come to one hundred before everybody had hidden themselves—­had scampered off to various hiding-places, Bob still stood in the middle of the kitchen-floor, wondering where in the world he should go to!  All of a sudden—­the girl in the corner had already reached sixty-four—­he thought he would go down in the cellar.

There was no rule against that—­at least none that he knew of—­and so, slipping softly to the cellar-door, over in the darkest corner of the kitchen, he opened it, and went softly down the steps.

There was a little light on the steps, for Bob did not shut the door quite tightly after him, and if there had been none at all, he would have been quite as well pleased.  He was not afraid of the dark, and all that now filled his mind was the thought of getting somewhere where no one could possibly find him.  So he groped his way under the steps, and there he squatted down in the darkness, behind two barrels which stood in a corner.

“Now,” thought Bob, “she won’t find me—­easy.”

He waited there a good while, and the longer he waited the prouder he became.

“I’ll bet mine’s the hardest place of all,” he said to himself.

[Illustration]

Bob heard a great deal of noise and shouting after the big girl came out from her corner and began finding the others, and he also heard a bang above his head, but he did not know that it was some one shutting the cellar-door.  After that all was quiet.

Bob listened, but could not hear a step.  He had not the slightest idea, of course, that they had stopped playing and were telling stories by the kitchen fire.  The big girl had found them all so easily that Hide-and-Seek had been voted down.

Bob had his own ideas in regard to this silence.  “I know,” he whispered to himself, “they’re all found, and they’re after me, and keeping quiet to hear me breathe!”

And, to prevent their finding his hiding-place by the sound of his breathing, Bob held his breath until he was red in the face.  He had heard often enough of that trick of keeping quiet and listening to breathing.  You couldn’t catch him that way!

When he was at last obliged to take a breath, you might have supposed he would have swallowed half the air in the cellar.  He thought he had never tasted anything so good as that long draught of fresh air.

“Can’t hold my breath all the time!” Bob thought.  “If I could, maybe they’d never find me at all,” which reflection was much nearer the truth than the little fellow imagined.

I don’t know how long Bob had been sitting under the steps—­it may have been five minutes, or it may have been a quarter of an hour, and he was beginning to feel a little cold—­when he heard the cellar-door open, and some one put their foot upon the steps.