stopdog, is the british boys' school Alcott's Little Men? Not quite as popular as her Little Women, for some reason, but I started with them. Also her Eight Cousins, which I adored. I've wanted to find The Latch Key Kids, five kids who solved a mystery, but they seem to have fallen off the face of the earth. Once in a while I'll come across a children's book in a used bookstore that I remember pieces of, so specifically, that I know I read it in childhood from the library. Pretty weird what the mind remembers. I also remember that we had a dictionary where the definition of "rarely" was "infrequently", and vice versa, and that's when I decided dictionaries were useless and you'd better figure out the meaning of a word fRom its context.