“There she goes now.  I’ll ask her!” offered Nan, as she saw the Bobbsey’s fat and good-natured colored cook cross the lawn with a small basket of clothes to hang up.  “We’ll have a little play-party out in the barn.”

“But I’m going to be real hungry—­not make believe!” said Freddie.  “I want to eat real.”

“And so you can!” declared Nan.  “I’ll get enough for all of us.”

A little later the Bobbsey twins—­the two pairs of them—­were on the way to the barn that stood a little way back of the house.  Mr. Bobbsey did not live on a farm.  He lived in a town, but his place was large enough to have a barn on it as well as a house.  He kept a horse, and sometimes a cow, but just now there was no cow in the stable—­only a horse.

And the horse was not there, either, just then, for it was being used to pull a wagon about the streets of Lakeport.  Mr. Bobbsey had an automobile, but he also kept the horse, and this animal was sometimes used by the clerks from the lumber office.

So out to the barn, which had in it the winter supply of hay and oats for the horse, went the Bobbsey twins.  Nan and Bert, being older, reached the place first, each one carrying some sugar and molasses cookies Dinah had given them.  After Nan and Bert ran Flossie and Freddie, each one looking anxiously at the packages of cookies,

“Don’t those cookies look good?” cried Flossie.

“And I guess they’ll eat just as good as they look,” was Freddie’s comment.

Just then Nan’s foot slipped on a small stone, and she came very near falling down.

“Oh!” cried Flossie and Freddie together.

“Don’t drop your cookies, Nan!” came quickly from Bert.

“Oh, if you dropped ’em they’d get all dirty,” said Flossie.

“They wouldn’t get very dirty,” answered Freddie hopefully.  “Anyway, we could brush ’em off.  They’d be good enough to eat, wouldn’t they?” and he looked at Bert.

“I guess they wouldn’t get very dirty,” answered Bert.  “Anyway, Nan didn’t drop them.  But you’d better be careful, Nan,” he went on.

“Don’t be so scared, Bert Bobbsey,” answered his sister.  “I won’t drop them.”

In a minute more the Bobbsey twins were at the barn where the sugar and molasses cookies Dinah had given them were put in a safe place.

“There are the ropes!” exclaimed Bert, as he pointed to some dangling from a beam near the haymow.

“They’re too high to climb!” Nan said, for some of the ropes were fast to the rafters of the barn.

“Oh, we won’t climb ’em!” Bert quickly returned, for he knew his mother would never allow this.  “We’ll just swing on ’em, low down near this pile of hay, so if we fall we can’t hurt ourselves.”

“I want to swing on a rope, too!” exclaimed Freddie, as he heard what his older brother and sister were talking of.  “I like to be a sailor and swing on a rope.”

“Not now, Freddie,” answered Bert.  “The ropes are too high for you and Flossie.  You just play around on the barn floor, and you can watch Nan and me swing.  Then we’ll play steamboat, maybe.”