Title: Wet Magic
Author: Edith Nesbit
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Language: English
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Wet Magic
E. Nesbit



CHAPTER I. SABRINA FAIR

THAT going to the seaside was the very beginning of everything,---only
it seemed as though it were going to be a beginning without an end,
like the roads on the Sussex downs which look like roads and then look
like paths, and then turn into sheep-tracks, and then are just grass
and furze bushes and tottergrass and harebells and rabbits and chalk.

The children had been counting the days to The Day. Bernard indeed had
made a Calendar on a piece of cardboard that had once been the bottom
of the box in which his new white sand-shoes came home. He marked the
divisions of the weeks quite neatly in red ink, and the days were
numbered in blue ink, and every day he crossed off one of those
numbers with a piece of green chalk he happened to have left out of a
penny box. Mavis had washed and ironed all the dolls' clothes at least
a fortnight before The Day. This was thoughtful and far-sighted of
her, of course, but it was a little trying to Kathleen, who was much
younger and who would have preferred to go on playing with her dolls
in their dirtier and more familiar state.

"Well, if you do," said Mavis, a little hot and cross from the
ironing-board, "I'll never wash anything for you again, not even your
face."

Kathleen somehow felt as if she could bear that.

"But mayn't I have just one of the dolls" was, however, all she said,-
"just the teeniest, weeniest one ? Let me have Lord Edward. His head's
half gone as it is, and I could dress him in a clean hanky and pretend
it was kilts."

Mavis could not object to this, because, of course, whatever else she
washed she didn't wash hankies. So Lord Edward had his pale kilts, and
the other dolls were put away in a row in Mavis's corner drawer. It
was after that that Mavis and Francis bad long secret
consultations,---and when the younger ones asked questions they were
told, "It's secrets. You'll know in good time." This, of course,
excited everyone very much indeed--and it was rather a come-down when
the good time came, and the secret proved to be nothing more
interesting than a large empty aquarium which the two elders had
clubbed their money together to buy, for eight-and-ninepence in the
Old Kent Road. They staggered up the front garden path with it, very
hot and tired.

"But what are you going to do with it?" Kathleen asked, as they all
stood round the nursery table looking at it.

"Fill it with sea-water," Francis explained, "to put sea-anemones in."

"Oh yes," said Kathleen with enthusiasm,--"and the crabs and starfish
and prawns and the yellow periwinkles---and all the common objects of
the seashore."

" We'll stand it in the window," Mavis added "it'll make the lodgings
look so distinguished."

"And then perhaps some great scientific gentleman, like Darwin or
Faraday, will see it as he goes by, and it will be such a joyous
surprise to him to come face to face with our jelly-fish; he'll offer
to teach Francis all about science for nothing---I see," said Kathleen
hopefully.

"But how will you get it to the seaside?" Bernard asked, leaning his
bands on the schoolroom table and breathing heavily into the aquarium,
so that its shining sides became dim and misty. " It's much too big to
go in the boxes, you know."

"Then I'll carry it," said Francis, "it won't be in the way at all--I
carried it home to-day."

"We had to take the bus, you know," said truthful Mavis, "and then I
had to help you."

"I don't believe they'll let you take it at all," said Bernard--if you
know anything of grownups you will know that Bernard proved to be
quite right.

"Take an aquarium to the seaside,--nonsense!" they said. And "What
for?" not waiting for the answer. "They," just at present, was Aunt
Enid.

Francis had always been passionately fond of water. Even when he was a
baby he always stopped crying the moment they put him in the bath. And
he was the little boy who, at the age of four, was lost for three
hours and then brought home by the police who had found him sitting in
a horse-trough in front of the Willing Mind, wet to the topmost hair
of his head, and quite happy, entertaining a circle of carters with
pots of beer in their hands. There was very little water in the horse-
trough and the most talkative of the carters explained that, the kid
being that wet at the first start off, him and his mates thought he
was as safe in the trough as anywhere--the weather being what it was
and all them nasty motors and trams about.

To Francis, passionately attracted as he was by water in all forms,
from the simple mudpuddle to the complicated machinery by which your
bath supply is enabled to get out of order, it was a real tragedy that
he bad never seen the sea. Something had always happened to prevent
it. Holidays had been spent in green countries where there were rivers
and wells and ponds, and waters deep and wide,-but the water had been
fresh water, and the green grass had been on each side of it. One
great charm of the sea, as he had heard of it, was that it had nothing
on the other side "so far as eye could see." There was a lot about the
sea in poetry, and Francis, curiously enough, liked poetry.

The buying of the aquarium had been an attempt to make sure that,
having found the sea, he should not lose it again. He imagined the
aquarium fitted with a real rock in the middle, to which radiant sea-
anemones clung and limpets stuck. There were to be yellow periwinkles
too, and seaweeds, and gold and silver fish (which don't live in the
sea by the way, only Francis didn't know this), flitting about in
radiant scaly splendour, among the shadows of the growing water-
plants. He had thought it all out--how a cover might be made, very
light, with rubber in between, like a screw-top bottle, to keep the
water in while it travelled home in the guard's van to the admiration
of passengers and porters at both stations. And now.---He was not to
be allowed to take it.

He told Mavis, and she agreed with him that it was a shame.

"But I'll tell you what," she said, for she was not one of those
comforters who just say, "I'm sorry," and don't try to help. She
generally thought of something that would make things at any rate just
a little better. "Let's fill it with fresh water, and get some
goldfish and sand and weeds; and I'll make Eliza promise to put ants'
eggs in--that's what they eat---and it'll be something to break the
dreadful shock when we have to leave the sea and come home again."

Francis admitted that there was something in this and consented to
fill the aquarium with water from the bath. When this was done the
aquarium was so heavy that the combined efforts of all four children
could not begin to move it.

"Never mind," said Mavis, the consoler; "let's empty it out again and
take it back to the common-room, and then fill it by secret jugfuls,
carried separately, you know."

This might have been successful, but Aunt Enid met the first secret
jugful---and forbade the second.

"Messing about," she called it. "No, of course I shan't allow you to
waste your money on fish." And Mother was already at the seaside
getting the lodgings ready for them. Her last words had been---

"Be sure you do exactly what Aunt Enid says." So, of course, they had
to. Also Mother had said, "Don't argue,"--so they had not even the
melancholy satisfaction of telling Aunt Enid that she was quite wrong,
and that they were not messing about at all.

Aunt Enid was not a real aunt, but just an old friend of Grandmamma's,
with an aunt's name and privileges and rather more than an aunt's
authority. She was much older than a real aunt and not half so nice.
She was what is called "firm" with children, and no one ever called
her auntie. Just Aunt Enid. That will tell you in a moment.

So there the aquarium was, dishearteningly dry---for even the few
drops left in it from its first filling dried up almost at once.

Even in its unwatery state, however, the aquarium was beautiful. It
had not any of that ugly iron-work with red lead showing between the
iron and the glass which you may sometimes have noticed in the
aquariums of your friends. No, it was one solid thick piece of clear
glass, faintly green, and when you stooped down and looked through you
could almost fancy that there really was water in it.

"Let's put flowers in it," Kathleen suggested, "and pretend they're
anemones. Do let's, Francis."

"I don't care what you do," said Francis. "I'm going to read The Water
Babies."

"Then we'll do it, and make it a lovely surprise for you," said
Kathleen cheerily.

Francis sat down squarely with The Water Babies flat before him on the
table, where also his elbows were, and the others, respecting his
sorrow, stole quietly away. Mavis just stepped back to say, "I say,
France, you don't mind their putting flowers? It's to please you, you
know."

"I tell you I don't mind anything," said Francis savagely.

When the three had finished with it, the aquarium really looked rather
nice, and, if you stooped down and looked sideways through the glass,
like a real aquarium.

Kathleen took some clinkers from the back of the rockery---"where they
won't show," she said--and Mavis induced these to stand up like an
arch in the middle of the glassy square. Tufts of long grass, rather
sparingly arranged, looked not unlike water-weed. Bernard begged from
the cook some of the fine silver sand which she uses to scrub the
kitchen tables and dressers with, and Mavis cut the thread of the
Australian shell necklace that Uncle Robert sent her last Christmas,
so that there should be real, shimmery, silvery shells on the sand.
(This was rather self-sacrificing of her, because she knew she would
have to put them all back again on their string, and you know what a
bother shells are to thread.) They shone delightfully through the
glass. But the great triumph was the sea-anemones--pink and red and
yellow--clinging to the rocky arch just as though they were growing
there.

"Oh, lovely, lovely," Kathleen cried, as Mavis fixed the last delicate
flesh-tinted crown. "Come and look, France."

"Not yet," said Mavis, in a great hurry, and she tied the thread of
the necklace round a tin goldfish (out of the box with the duck and
the boat and the mackerel and the lobster and the magnet that makes
them all move about---you know) and hung it from the middle of the
arch. It looked just as though it were swimming,--you hardly noticed
the thread at all.

"Now, France," she called. And Francis came slowly with his thumb in
The Water Babies. It was nearly dark by now, but Mavis had lighted the
four dolls'-house candles in the gilt candlesticks and set them on the
table round the aquarium.

"Look through the side," she said; "isn't it ripping?"

"Why," said Francis slowly, "you've got water in it--and real
anemones! Where on earth...?"

"Not real," said Mavis. "I wish they were; they're only dahlias. But
it does look pretty, doesn't it?"

"It's like Fairyland," said Kathleen, and Bernard added, "I am glad
you bought it."

"It just shows what it will be like when we do get the sea creatures,"
said Mavis. "Oh, Francis, you do like it, don't you?"

"Oh, I like it all right," he answered, pressing his nose against the
thick glass, "but I wanted it to be waving weeds and mysterious
wetness like the Sabrina picture."

The other three glanced at the picture which hung over the mantel
piece--Sabrina and the water-nymphs, drifting along among the
waterweeds and water-lilies. There were words under the picture, and
Francis dreamily began to say them:--

  "Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting.

Under the glassy green, translucent wave...

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thine amber-dropping hair..."

"Hullo-what was that?" he said in quite a different voice, and jumped
up.

"What was what?" the others naturally asked.

"Did you put something alive in there?" Francis asked.

"Of course not," said Mavis. "Why?"

"Well, I saw something move, that's all."

They all crowded round and peered over the glass walls. Nothing, of
course, but the sand and the grass and the shells, the clinkers and
the dahlias and the little suspended tin goldfish.

"I expect the goldfish swung a bit," said Bernard. "That's what it
must have been."

"It didn't look like that," Francis answered. "It looked more like-"

"Like what?"

"I don't know--get out of the light. Let's have another squint."

He stooped down and looked again through the glass.

"It's not the goldfish," he said. "That's as quiet as a trout asleep.
No--I suppose it was a shadow or something."

"You might tell us what it looked like," said Kathleen.

"Was it like a rat?" Bernard asked with interest.

"Not a bit. It was more like-"

"Well, like what?" asked three aggravated voices.

"Like Sabrina-only very, very tiny."

"A sort of doll---Sabrina," said Kathleen, "how awfully jolly!"

"It wasn't at all like a doll, and it wasn't jolly," said Francis
shortly,--"only I wish it would come again."

It didn't, however.

"I say," said Mavis, struck by a new idea, "perhaps it's a magic
aquarium."

"Let's play it is," suggested Kathleen,--"let's play it's a magic
glass and we can see what we like in it. I see a fairy palace with
gleaming spires of crystal and silver.
"
"I see a football match, and our chaps winning," said Bernard heavily,
joining in the new game.

"Shut up," said Francis. "This isn't play. There was something."

"Suppose it is magic," said Mavis again.

"We've played magic so often, and nothing's ever happened---even when
we made the fire of sweet-scented woods and eastern gums, and all
that," said Bernard; "it's much better to pretend right away. We
always have to in the end. Magic just wastes time. There isn't any
magic really, is there, Mavis?"

"Shut up, I tell you," was the only answer of Francis, his nose now
once more flattened against the smooth green glass.

Here Aunt Enid's voice was heard on the landing outside, saying, "
Little ones--bed," in no uncertain tones.

The two grunted as it were in whispers, but there was no appeal
against Aunt Enid, and they went, their grunts growing feebler as they
crossed the room, and dying away in a despairing silence as they and
Aunt Enid met abruptly at the top of the stairs.

"Shut the door," said Francis, in a strained sort of voice. And Mavis
obeyed, even though he hadn't said "please." She really was an
excellent sister. Francis, in moments of weakness, had gone so far as
to admit that she wasn't half bad.

"I say," she said when the click of the latch assured her that they
were alone, "how could it be magic? We never said any spell."

"No more we did," said Francis, "unless---And besides, it's all
nonsense, of course, about magic. It's just a game we play, isn't it?"

"Yes, of course," Mavis said doubtfully; "but what did you mean by
'unless'?"

"We weren't saying any spells, were we?"

"No, of course we weren't---we weren't saying anything--"

"As it happens I was."

"Was what? When?"

"When it happened."

"What happened?"

Will it be believed that Aunt Enid chose this moment for opening the
door just wide enough to say, "Mavis-bed." And Mavis had to go. But as
she went she said again : "What happened? "

"It," said Francis, "whatever it was. I was saying . . . .

"MAVIS'!" called Aunt Enid.

"Yes, Aunt Enid--you were saying what?"

"I was saying, 'Sabrina fair'...," said Francis, "do you think--but,
of course, it couldn't have been--and all dry like that, no water or
anything."

"Perhaps magic has to be dry," said Mavis. "Coming, Aunt Enid! It
seems to be mostly burning things, and, of course, that wouldn't do in
the water. What did you see?

"It looked like Sabrina," said Francis--"only tiny, tiny. Not doll-
small, you know, but live-small, like through the wrong end of a
telescope. I do wish you'd seen it."

"Say 'Sabrina fair' again quick while I look."

  "'Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting.

Under the--'

"Oh, Mavis, it is--it did. There's something there truly. Look!"

"Where?" said Mavis. "I can't see--oh, let me look."

"MAVIS!" called Aunt Enid very loud indeed; and Mavis tore herself
away.

"I must go," she said. "Never mind, we'll look again to-morrow. Oh,
France, if it should be--magic, I mean--I'll tell you what-"

But she never told him what, for Aunt Enid swept in and swept out,
bearing Mavis away, as it were, in a whirlwind of impatient
exasperation, and, without seeming to stop to do it, blowing out the
four candles as she came and went.

At the door she turned to say, "Good-night, Francis. Your bath's
turned on ready. Be sure you wash well behind your ears. We shan't
have much time in the morning."

"But Mavis always baths first," said he. "I'm the eldest."

"Don't argue, child, for goodness' sake," said Aunt Enid. "Mavis is
having the flat bath in my bedroom to save time. Come--no nonsense,"
she paused at the door to say. "Let me see you go. Right about face-
quick march!"

And he had to.

"If she must pretend to give orders like drill, she might at least
learn to say 'Bout turn!'" he reflected, struggling with his collar
stud in the steaming bathroom. "Never mind. I'll get up early and see
if I can't see it again."

And so he did--but early as he was, Aunt Enid and the servants were
earlier. The aquarium was empty--clear, clean, shining and quite
empty.

Aunt Enid could not understand why Francis ate so little breakfast.

"What has she done with them?" he wondered later.

"I know," said Bernard solemnly. "She told Esther to put them on the
kitchen fire--I only just saved my fish."

"And what about my shells?" asked Mavis in sudden fear.

"Oh, she took those to take care of. Said you weren't old enough to
take care of them yourself."

You will wonder why the children did not ask their Aunt Enid right out
what had become of the contents of the aquarium. Well, you don't know
their Aunt Enid. And besides, even on that first morning, before
anything that really was anything could be said to have happened--for,
after all, what Francis said he had seen might have been just fancy---
there was a sort of misty, curious, trembling feeling at the hearts of
Mavis and her brother which made them feel that they did not want to
talk about the aquarium and what had been in it to any grown-up,--and
least of all to their Aunt Enid.

And leaving the aquarium, that was the hardest thing of all, They
thought of telegraphing to Mother, to ask whether, after all, they
mightn't bring it,--but there was first the difficulty of wording a
telegram so that their mother would understand and not deem it
insanity or a practical joke---secondly, the fact that tenpence
halfpenny, which was all they had between them, would not cover the
baldest statement of the facts.

  MRS DESMOND.

    CARE OF MRS PEARCE.

      EAST CLIFF VILLA.

        LEWIS ROAD.

          WEST BEACHFIELD-ON-SEA, SUSSEX

Alone would be eightpence--and the simplest appeal, such as "May we
bring aquarium please say yes wire reply" brought the whole thing
hopelessly beyond their means.

"It's no good," said Francis hopelessly.

"And, anyway," said Kathleen, "there wouldn't be time to get an answer
before we go."

No one had thought of this. It was a sort of backhanded consolation.

"But think of coming back to it," said Mavis "it'll be something to
live for, when we come back from the sea and everything else is
beastly."

And it was.



CHAPTER II. THE CAPTIVE

THE delicate pinkish bloom of newness was on the wooden spades, the
slick smoothness of the painted pails showed neither scratch nor dent
on their green and scarlet surface--the shrimping nets were full and
fluffy as, once they and sand and water had met, they never could be
again. The pails and spades and nets formed the topmost layer of a
pile of luggage---you know the sort of thing, with the big boxes at
the bottom; and the carry-all bulging with its wraps and mackers; the
old portmanteau that shows its striped lining through the crack and is
so useful for putting boots in; and the sponge-bag, and all the little
things that get left out. You can almost always squeeze a ball or a
paint-box or a box of chalks or any of those things---which grown-ups
say you won't really want till you come back---into that old
portmanteau---and then when it's being unpacked at the journey's end
the most, that can happen will be that someone will say, "I thought I
told you not to bring that," and if you don't answer back, that will
be all. But most likely in the agitation of unpacking and settling in,
your tennis ball, or pencil-box, or whatever it is, will pass
unnoticed. Of course you can't shove an aquarium into the old
portmanteau---nor a pair of rabbits, nor a hedgehog--but anything in
reason you can.

The luggage that goes in the van is not much trouble---of course it
has to be packed and to be strapped, and labelled and looked after at
the junction, but apart from that the big luggage behaves itself,
keeps itself to itself, and like your elder brothers at college never
occasions its friends a moment's anxiety. It is the younger fry of the
luggage family, the things you have with you in the carriage that are
troublesome--the bundle of umbrellas and walking-sticks, the golf
clubs, the rugs, the greatcoats, the basket of things to eat, the
books you are going to read in the train and as often as not you never
look at them, the newspapers that the grown-ups are tired of and yet
don't want to throw away, their little bags or dispatch-cases and
suit-cases and card-cases, and scarfs and gloves--

The children were travelling uhder the care of Aunt Enid, who always
had far more of these tiresome odds and ends than Mother had---and it
was at the last moment, when the cab was almost to be expected to be
there, that Aunt Enid rushed out to the corner shop and returned with
four new spades, four new pails, and four new shrimping nets, and
presented them to the children just in time for them to be added to
the heap of odds and ends with which the cab was filled up.

"I hope it's not ungrateful," said Mavis at the station as they stood
waiting by the luggage mound while Aunt Enid went to take the
tickets---"but why couldn't she have bought them at Beachfield?"

"Makes us look such babies," said Francis, who would not be above
using a wooden spade at the proper time and place but did not care to
be branded in the face of all Waterloo Junction as one of those kids
off to the seaside with little spades and pails.

Kathleen and Bernard were, however, young enough to derive a certain
pleasure from stroking the smooth, curved surface of the spades till
Aunt Enid came fussing back with the tickets and told them to put
their gloves on for goodness' sake and try not to look like street
children.

I am sorry that the first thing you should hear about the children
should be that they did not care about their Aunt Enid, but this was
unfortunately the case. And if you think this was not nice of them I
can only remind you that you do not know their Aunt Enid.

There was a short, sharp struggle with the porter, a flustered passage
along the platform and the children were safe in the carriage marked
Reserved---thrown into it, as it were, with all that small fry of
luggage which I have just described. Then Aunt Enid fussed off again
to exchange a few last home truths with the porter, and the children
were left.

"We breathe again," said Mavis.

"Not yet we don't," said Francis, "there'll be some more fuss as soon
as she comes back. I'd almost as soon not go to the sea as go with
her."

"But you've never seen the sea," Mavis reminded him.

"I know," said Francis, morosely, "but look at all this-" he indicated
the tangle of their possessions which littered seats and rack--"I do
wish-"

He stopped, for a head appeared in the open doorway-in a round hat
very like Aunt Enid's---but it was not Aunt Enid's.

The face under the hat was a much younger, kinder one.

"I'm afraid this carriage is reserved," said the voice that belonged
to the face.

"Yes," said Kathleen, "but there's lots of room if you like to come
too."

"I don't know if the aunt we're with would like it," said the more
cautious Mavis. "We should, of course," she added to meet the kind
smiling eyes that looked from under the hat that was like Aunt Enid's.

The lady said: "I'm an aunt too--I'm going to meet my nephew at the
junction. The train's frightfully crowded...If I were to talk to your
aunt...perhaps on the strength of our common aunthood. The train will
start in a minute. I haven't any luggage to be a bother---nothing but
one paper"---she had indeed a folded newspaper in her hands.

"Oh, do get in," said Kathleen, dancing with anxiety, "I'm sure Aunt
Enid won't mind,"--Kathleen was always hopeful--"suppose the train
were to start or anything!"

"Well, if you think I may," said the lady, and tossed her paper into
the corner in a lighthearted way which the children found charming.
Her pleasant face was rising in the oblong of the carriage doorway,
her foot was on the carriage step, when suddenly she retreated back
and down. It was almost as though someone pulled her off the carriage
step.

"Excuse me," said a voice, "this carriage is reserved." The pleasant
face of the lady disappeared and the---well, the face of Aunt Enid
took its place. The lady vanished. Aunt Enid trod on Kathleen's foot,
pushed against Bernard's waistcoat, sat down, partly on Mavis and
partly on Francis and said--"Of all the impertinence!" Then someone
banged the door---the train shivered and trembled and pulled itself
together in the way we all know so well---grunted, snorted, screamed,
and was off: Aunt Enid stood up arranging things on the rack, so that
the children could not even see if the nice lady had found a seat in
the train.

"Well---I do think-" Francis could not help saying.

"Oh-do you?" said Aunt Enid, "I should never have thought it of you."

When she had arranged the things in the rack to her satisfaction she
pointed out a few little faults that she had noticed in the children
and settled down to read a book by Miss Marie Corelli. The children
looked miserably at each other. They, could not understand why Mother
had placed them under the control of this most unpleasant mock aunt.

There was a reason for it, of course. If your parents, who are
generally so kind and jolly, suddenly do a thing that you can't
understand and can hardly bear, you may be quite sure they have a good
reason for it. The reason in this case was that Aunt Enid was the only
person who offered to take charge of the children at a time when all
the nice people who usually did it were having influenza. Also she was
an old friend of Granny's. Granny's taste in friends must have been
very odd, Francis decided, or else Aunt Enid must have changed a good
deal since she was young. And there she sat reading her dull book. The
children also had been provided with books---Eric, or Little by
Little, Elsie, or Like a Little Candle, Brave Bessie and Ingenious
Isabel had been dealt out as though they were cards for a game, before
leaving home. They had been a great bother to carry, and they were
impossible to read. Kathleen and Bernard presently preferred looking
out of the windows, and the two elder ones tried to read the paper
left by the lady, "looking over."

Now, that is just where it was, and really what all that has been
written before is about. If that lady hadn't happened to look in at
their door, and if she hadn't happened to leave the paper they would
never have seen it, because they weren't the sort of children who read
papers except under extreme provocation.

You will not find it easy to believe, and I myself can't see why it
should have happened, but the very first word they saw in that
newspaper was Beachfield, and the second was On, and the third was
Sea, and the fifth was Mermaid. The fourth which came between Sea and
Mermaid was Alleged.

"I say," said Mavis, "let's look."

"Don't pull then, you can see all right," said Francis, and this is
what they read together:

  "BEACHFIELD-ON-SEA---ALLEGED MERMAID."

  "AMAZING STORY."

  "At this season of the year, which has come to be designated the
silly season, the public press is deluged with puerile old-world
stories of gigantic gooseberries and enormous sea-serpents. So that it
is quite in keeping with the weird traditions of this time of the year
to find a story of some wonder of the deep, arising even at so well-
known a watering-place as Beachfield. Close to an excellent golf-
course, and surrounded by various beauty spots, with a thoroughly
revised water-supply, a newlypainted pier and three rival
Cinematograph Picture Palaces, Beachfield has long been known as a
rising plage of exceptional attractions, the quaint charm of its..."

"Hold on," said Francis, "this isn't about any old Mermaid."

"Oh, that'll be further on," said Mavis. "I expect they have to put
all that stuff in to be polite to Beachfield---let's skip---'agreeable
promenade, every modern convenience, while preserving its quaint...'
What does quaint mean, and why do they keep on saying it?"

"I don't think it means anything," said Francis, "it's just a word
they use, like weird and dainty. You always see it in a newspaper.
Ah--got her. Here she is--

"The excitement may be better imagined than described'--no, that's
about the Gymkhana--here we are--"

  "Master Wilfred Wilson, the son of a well-known and respected
resident, arrived home yesterday evening in tears. Inquiry elicited a
statement that he had been paddling in the rock pools, which are to be
found, in such profusion under the West Cliff, when something gently
pinched his foot. He feared that it might be a lobster, having heard
that these crustaceans sometimes attack the unwary intruder, and he
screamed. So far his story, though unusual, contains nothing
inherently impossible. But when he went on to state that a noise "like
a lady speaking" told him not to cry, and that, on looking down, he
perceived that what held him was a hand "coming from one of the rocks
under water," his statement was naturally received with some
incredulity. It was not until a boating-party returning from a
pleasure trip westward stated that they had seen a curious sort of
white seal with a dark tail darting through the clear water below
their boat that Master Wilfred's story obtained any measure of
credence."

("What's credence?" said Mavis.

"Oh, never mind. It's what you believe with, I think. Go on," said
Francis.)

  "'--of credence. Mr Wilson, who seems to have urged an early
retirement to bed as a cure for telling stories and getting his feet
wet, allowed his son to rise and conduct him to the scene of
adventure. But Mr Wilson, though he even went to the length of
paddling in some of the pools, did not see or feel any hands nor hear
any noise, ladylike or otherwise. No doubt the seal theory is the
correct one. A white seal would be a valuable acquisition to the town,
and would, no doubt, attract visitors. Several boats have gone out,
some with nets and some with lines. Mr Carrerras, a visitor from South
America, has gone out with a lariat, which in these latitudes is, of
course, quite a novelty."'

"That's all," whispered Francis, and glanced at Aunt Enid. "I say--
she's asleep." He beckoned the others, and they screwed themselves
along to that end of the carriage furthest from the slumbering aunt.
"Just listen to this," he said. Then in hoarse undertones he read all
about the Mermaid.

"I say," said Bernard, "I do hope it's a seal. I've never seen a
seal."

"I hope they do catch it," said Kathleen, "fancy seeing a real live
Mermaid."

"If it's a real live Mermaid I jolly well hope they don't catch her,"
said Francis.

"So do I," said Mavis. "I'm certain she would die in captivity."

"But I'll tell you what," said Francis, "we'll go and look for her,
first thing tomorrow. I suppose," he added thoughtfully, "Sabrina was
a sort of Mermaid."

"She hasn't a tail, you know," Kathleen reminded him.

"It isn't the tail that makes the Mermaid," Francis reminded her.
"It's being able to live under water. If it was the tail, then
mackerels would be Mermaids."

"And, of course, they're not. I see," said Kathleen.

"I wish," said Bernard, "that she'd given us bows and arrows instead
of pails and spades, and then we could have gone seal-shooting-"

"Or Mermaid---shooting," said Kathleen. "Yes, that would have been
ripping."

Before Francis and Mavis could say how shocked they were at the idea
of shooting Mermaids, Aunt Enid woke up and took the newspaper away
from them, because newspapers are not fit reading for children.

She was somehow the kind of person before whom you never talk about
anything that you really care for, and it was impossible therefore to
pursue either seals or Mermaids. It seemed best to read Eric and the
rest of the books. It was uphill work.

But the last two remarks of Bernard and Kathleen had sunk into the
minds of the two elder children. That was why, when they had reached
Beachfield and found Mother and rejoiced over her, and when Aunt Enid
had unexpectedly gone on by that same train to stay with her really
relations at Bournemouth, they did not say any more to the little ones
about Mermaids or seals, but just joined freely in the chorus of
pleasure at Aunt Enid's departure.

"I thought she was going to stay with us all the time," said Kathleen.
"Oh, Mummy, I am so glad she isn't."

"Why?--don't you like Aunt Enid? Isn't she kind?"

All four thought of the spades and pails and shrimping nets, and of
Eric and Elsie and the other books---and all said:

"Yes."

"Then what was it?" Mother asked. And they could not tell her. It is
sometimes awfully difficult to tell things to your mother, however
much you love her. The best Francis could do was:

"Well--you see we're not used to her."

And Kathleen said: "I don't think perhaps she's used to being an aunt.
But she was kind."

And Mother was wise and didn't ask any more questions. Also she at
once abandoned an idea one had had of asking Aunt Enid to come and
stay at Beachfield for part of the holidays; and this was just as
well, for if Aunt Enid had not passed out of the story exactly when
she did, there would not have been any story to pass out of. And as
she does now pass out of the story I will say that she thought she was
very kind, and that she meant extremely well.

There was a little whispering between Francis and Mavis just after
tea, and a little more just before bed, but it was tactfully done and
the unwhispered-to younger ones never noticed it.

The lodgings were very nice--a little way out of the town--not a villa
at all as everyone had feared. I suppose the landlady thought it
grander to call it a villa, but it was really a house that had once
been a mill-house, and was all made of a soft-coloured grey wood with
a red-tiled roof, and at the back was the old mill, also grey and
beautiful--not used now for what it was built for--but just as a store
for fishing nets and wheel-barrows and old rabbit-hutches and bee-
hives and harness and odds and ends, and the sack of food for the
landlady's chickens. There was a great corn bin there too--that must
have been in some big stable,--and some broken chairs and an old
wooden cradle, that hadn't had any babies in it since the landlady's
mother was a little girl.

On any ordinary holiday the mill would have had all the charm of a
magic palace for the children, with its wonderful collection of
pleasant and unusual things to play with, but just now all their
thoughts were on Mermaids. And the two elder ones decided that they
would go out alone the first thing in the morning and look for the
Mermaid.

Mavis woke Francis up very early indeed, and they got up and dressed
quite quietly, not washing, I am sorry to say, because water makes
such a noise when you pour it out. And I am afraid their hairs were
not very thoroughly brushed either. There was not a soul stirring in
the road as they went out, unless you count the mill cat who had been
out all night and was creeping home very tired and dusty looking, and
a yellow-hammer who sat on a tree a hundred yards down the road and
repeated his name over and over again in that conceited way yellow-
hammers have, until they got close to him, and then he wagged his tail
impudently at them and flew on to the next tree where he began to talk
about himself as loudly as ever.

This desire to find the Mermaid must have been wonderfully strong in
Francis, for it completely swallowed the longing of years--the longing
to see the sea. It had been too dark the night before to see anything
but the winking faces of the houses as the fly went past them. But now
as he and Mavis ran noiselessly down the sandy path in their rubber
shoes and turned the corner of the road, he saw a great pale grey
something spread out in front of him, lit with points of red and gold
fire where the sun touched it. He stopped.

"Mavis," he said, in quite an odd voice, "that's the sea."

"Yes," she said and stopped too.

"It isn't a bit what I expected," he said, and went on running.

"Don't you like it?" asked Mavis, running after him.

"Oh--like," said Francis, "it isn't the sort of thing you like."

When they got down to the shore the sands and the pebbles were all wet
because the tide had just gone down, and there were the rocks and the
little rock pools, and the limpets, and whelks, and the little yellow
periwinkles looking like particularly fine Indian corn all scattered
among the red and the brown and the green seaweed.

"Now, this is jolly," said Francis. "This is jolly if you like. I
almost wish we'd wakened the others. It doesn't seem quite fair."

"Oh, they've seen it before," Mavis said, quite truly, "and I don't
think it's any good going by fours to look for Mermaids, do you?"

"Besides," said Francis, saying what had been in their thoughts since
yesterday in the train, "Kathleen wanted to shoot Mermaids, and
Bernard thought it was seals, anyhow."

They had sat down and were hastily pulling off their shoes and
stockings.

"Of course," said he, "we shan't find anything. It isn't likely."

"Well," she said, "for anything we jolly well know, they may have
found her already. Take care how you go over these rocks, they're
awfully slippy."

"As if I didn't know that," said he, and ran across the narrow strip
of sand that divided rocks from shingle and set his foot for the first
time in The Sea. It was only a shallow little green and white rock
pool, but it was the sea all the same.

"I say, isn't it cold," said Mavis, withdrawing pink and dripping
toes; "do mind how you go-"

"As if I-" said Francis, again, and sat down suddenly and splashingly
in a large, clear sparkling pool.

"Now, I suppose we've got to go home at once and you change," said
Mavis, not without bitterness.

"Nonsense," said Francis, getting up with some difficulty and clinging
wetly to Mavis to steady himself. "I'm quite dry, almost."

"You know what colds are like," said Mavis, "and staying indoors all
day, or perhaps bed, and mustard plasters and gruel with butter in it.
Oh, come along home, we should never have found the Mermaid. It's much
too bright, and light and everydayish for anything like magic to
happen. Come on home, do."

"Let's just go out to the end of the rocks," Francis urged, "just to
see what it's like where the water gets deep and the seaweed goes
swish, swish, all long and lanky and grassy, like in the Sabrina
picture."

"Half-way then, not more," said Mavis, firmly, "it's dangerous-deep
outside-Mother said so."

And half-way they went, Mavis still cautious, and Francis, after his
wetting, almost showing off in his fine carelessness of whether he
went in again or not. It was very jolly. You know how soft and squeezy
the blobby kind of sea-weed is to walk on, and how satin smooth is the
ribbon kind; how sharp are limpets, especially when they are covered
with barnacles, and how comparatively bearable to the foot are the
pale primrose-coloured hemispheres of the periwinkle.

"Now," said Mavis, "come on back. We'll run all the way as soon as we
get our shoes and stockings on for fear of colds."

"I almost wish we hadn't come," said Francis, turning with a face of
gloom.

"You didn't really think we should find a Mermaid, did you?" Mavis
asked, and laughed, though she was really annoyed with Francis for
getting wet and cutting short this exciting morning game. But she was
a good sister.

"It's all been so silly. Flopping into that pool, and talking and
rotting, and just walking out and in again. We ought to have come by
moonlight, and been very quiet and serious, and said--

"Sabrina fair.

Listen where thou art sitting--"

"Ow--Hold on a minute. I've caught my foot in something."

Mavis stopped and took hold of her brother's arm to steady him; and as
she did so both children plainly heard a voice that was not the voice
of either of them. It was the sweetest voice in the world they
thought, and it said:

"Save her. We die in captivity."

Francis looked down and had a sort of sudden sight of something white
and brown and green that moved and went quickly down under the stone
on which Mavis was standing. There was nothing now holding his foot.

"I say," he said, on a deep breath of awe and wonder, "did you hear
that?"

"Of course, I heard it."

"We couldn't both have fancied it," he said, "I wish it had told us
who to save, and where, and how-"

"Whose do you think that voice was?" Mavis asked softly.

"The Mermaid's," said Francis, "who else's could it have been?"

"Then the magic's really begun-"

"Mermaids aren't magic," he said, "any more than flying fishes or
giraffes are."

"But she came when you said 'Sabrina fair,'" said Mavis.

"Sabrina wasn't a Mermaid," said Francis firmly. "It's no use trying
to join things on when they won't. Come on, we may as well be getting
home."

"Mightn't she be?" suggested Mavis. "A Mermaid, I mean. Like salmon
that live in rivers and go down to the sea."

"I say, I never thought of that. How simply ripping if it turned out
to be really Sabrina---wouldn't it be? But which do you suppose could
be her---the one who spoke to us or the one she's afraid will die in
captivity---the one she wants us to save."

They had reached the shore by now and Mavis looked up from turning her
brown stockings right way out to say:

"I suppose we didn't really both fancy it. Could we have? Isn't there
some sort of scientific magic that makes people think the same things
as each other when it's not true at all, like with Indian mango-
tricks? Uncle Fred said so, you know, they call it 'Tell ee
something.'"

"I'll tell you something," said Francis, urgent with shoe-lace, "if we
keep on saying things weren't when we know perfectly well they were,
we shall soon dish up any sort of chance of magic we may ever have
had. When do you find people in books going on like that? They just
say 'This is magic!' and behave as if it was. They don't go pretending
they're not sure. Why, no magic would stand it."

"Aunt Dorothea once told me that all magic was like Prince Rupert's
drop," Mavis owned "if once you broke it there was nothing left but a
little dust."

"That's just what I'm saying, isn't it? We've always felt there was
magic right enough, haven't we? Well, now we've come across it, don't
let's be silly and pretend. Let's believe in it as hard as ever we
can. Mavis---shall we, eh? Believing in things makes them stronger.
Aunt Dorothea said that too---you remember."

They stood up in their shoes.

"Shall we tell the others?" Mavis asked.

"We must," said Francis, "it would be so sneakish not to. But they
won't believe us. We shall have to be like Cassandra and not mind."

"I only wish I knew who it is we've got to save," said Mavis.

Francis had a very strong and perfect feeling that they would know
this all in good time. He could not have explained this, but he felt
it. All he said was, "Let's run."

And they ran.

Kathleen and Bernard met them at the gate, dancing with excitement and
impatience.

"Where have you been?" they cried and "What on earth?" and "Why,
you're all wet, France."

"Down to the sea--shut up, I know I am-" their elder brother came in
and passed up the path to the gate.

"You might have called us," said Kathleen in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-
anger sort of voice, "but anyhow you've lost something by going out so
early without us."

"Lost something. What?"

"Hearing the great news," said Bernard, and he added, "Aha!"

"What news?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Bernard was naturally annoyed at having
been left out of the first expedition of the holidays. Anyone would
have. Even you or I.

"Out with it," said Francis, with a hand on Bernard's ear. There came
a yell from Bernard and Mother's voice from the window, saying,
"Children, children."

"All right, Mummy. Now, Bear,--don't be a young rotter. What's the
news?"

"You're hurting my ear," was all Bernard's rejoinder.

"All right," said Francis, "we've got some news too. But we won't
tell, will we, Mavis?"

"Oh don't," said Kathleen, "don't let's be sneaky, the very first day
too. It's only that they've caught the mermaid, and I'm afraid that
she'll die in captivity, like you said. What's yours?"

Francis had released Bernard's ear and now he turned to Mavis.

"So that's it" he said slowly---"Who's got her?"

"The circus people. What's your news?" asked Kathleen eagerly.

"After brek," said Francis. "Yes mother, half a sec. I apologise about
the ear, Bernard. We will tell you all. Oh, it's quite different from
what you think. We meet and discuss the situation in the mill the
minute we're free from brek. Agreed? Right! Yes Mother, coming!"

"Then there must," Mavis whispered to Francis "be two mermaids. They
can't both be Sabrina... then which..."

"We've got to save one of them anyhow," Francis answered with the
light of big adventure in his eye, "they die in captivity."



CHAPTER III. THE RESCUE

THE great question, of course, was--Would Mother take them to the
circus, or would she, if she wouldn't herself take them, let them go
alone? She had once, in Buckinghamshire, allowed them to go to a
travelling menagerie, after exacting from them a promise that they
were not to touch any of the animals, and they had seen reason to
regret their promise when the showman offered to let them stroke his
tame performing wolf, who was so very like a collie. When they had
said, "No, thank you," the showman had said, "Oh, frightened, are you?
Run along home to Mammy then!" and the bystanders had laughed in a
most insulting way. At a circus, of course, the horses and things
aren't near enough for you to stroke them, so this time they might not
be asked to promise. If Mother came with them her presence, though
agreeable, would certainly add to the difficulties, already quite
enough---as even Mavis could not but see---of rescuing the Mermaid.
But suppose Mother didn't come with them.

"Suppose we have to promise we won't touch any of the animals?"
suggested Cathay. "You can't rescue a person without touching it."

"That's just it," said Mavis, "a Mermaid isn't an animal. She's a
person."

"But suppose it isn't that sort of Mermaid," said Bernard. "Suppose
it's the sort that other people call seals, like it said in the
paper."

"Well, it isn't," said Francis briefly, adding, "so there!"

They were talking in the front garden, leaning over the green gate
while Mother upstairs unpacked the luggage that had been the mound
with spades on top only yesterday, at Waterloo.

"Mavis!" Mother called through the open window. "I can only find---but
you'd better come up."

"I ought to offer to help Mother unpack," said Mavis, and went walking
slowly.

She came back after a little while, however, quickly running.

"It's all right," she said. "Mother's going to meet Daddy at the
Junction this afternoon and buy us sunbonnets. And we're to take our
spades and go down to the sea till dinner-time---it's roast rabbit and
apple dumps---I asked Mrs Pearce---and we can go to the circus by
ourselves,---and she never said a word about promise not to touch the
animals."

So off they went, down the whe road where the yellow-hammer was
talking about himself as usual on the tree just beyond wherever you
happened to be walking. And so to the beach.

Now, it is very difficult to care much about a Mermaid you have never
seen or heard or touched. On the other band, when once you have seen
one and touched one and heard one speak, you seem to care for very
little else. This was why when they got to the shore Kathleen and
Bernard began at once to dig the moat of a sand castle, while the
elder ones walked up and down, dragging the new spades after them like
some new kind of tail, and talking, talking, talking till Kathleen
said they might help dig or the tide would be in before the castle was
done.

"You don't know what a lark sand castles are, France," she added
kindly, "because you've never seen the sea before."

So then they all dug and piled and patted and made moulds of their
pails to stand as towers to the castle and dug out dungeons and
tunnels and bridges, only the roof always gave way in the end unless
you had beaten the sand very tight beforehand. It was a glorious
castle, though not quite finished when the first thin flat wash of the
sea reached it. And then every one worked twice as hard trying to keep
the sea out till all was hopeless, and then everyone crowded into the
castle and the sea washed it away bit by bit till there was only a
shapeless island left, and everyone was wet through and had to change
every single thing the minute they got home. You will know by that how
much they enjoyed themselves.

After the roast rabbit and the apple dumplings Mother started on the
sunbonnet-and-meet-Daddy expedition. Francis went with her to the
station and returned a little sad.

"I had to promise not to touch any of the animals," he said. "And
perhaps a Mermaid is an animal."

"Not if she can speak," said Kathleen. "I say, don't you think we
ought to wear our best things---I do. It's more respectable to the
wonders of the deep. She'd like us to look beautiful."

"I'm not going to change for anybody," said Bernard firmly.

"All right, Bear," said Mavis. "Only we will. Remember it's magic."

"I say, France," he said, "do you think we ought to change?"

"No, I don't," Francis answered. "I don't believe Mermaids care a bit
what you've got on. You see, they don't wear anything but tails and
hair and looking-glasses themselves. If there's any beautifulness to
be done they jolly well do it themselves. But I don't say you wouldn't
be better for washing your hands again, and you might as well try to
get some of the sand out of your hair. It looks like the wrong end of
a broom as it is."

He himself went so far as to put on the blue necktie that Aunt Amy bad
given him, and polished his silver watch-chain on the inside of his
jacket. This helped to pass the time till the girls were ready. At
last this happened though they had put on their best things, and they
started.

The yellow-hammer went on about himself--he was never tired of the
subject.

"It's just as if that bird was making fun of us," Bernard said.

"I daresay it is a wild-goose step we're taking," said Kathleen; "but
the circus will be jolly, anyhow."

There is a piece of waste land just beyond Beachfield on the least
agreeable side of that village---the side where the flat-faced shops
are and the yellow brick houses. At the nice end of Beachfield the
shops have little fat bow windows with greenish glass that you can
hardly see through. Here also are gaunt hoardings plastered with
tattered, ugly-coloured posters, asking you in red to wear Ramsden's
Really Boots, or to Vote for Wilton Ashby in blue. Some of the corners
of the posters are always loose and flap dismally in the wind. There
is always a good deal of straw and torn paper and dust at this end of
the village, and bits of dirty rag, and old boots and tins are found
under the hedges where flowers ought to be. Also there are a great
many nettles and barbed wires instead of pleasant-coloured fences.
Don't you sometimes wonder who is to blame for all the uglification of
places that might be so pretty, and wish you could have a word with
them and ask them not to? Perhaps when these people were little nobody
told them how wrong it is to throw orange-peel about, and the bits of
paper off chocolate, and the paper bag which once concealed your bun.
And it is a dreadful fact that the children who throw these things
about are little uglifiers, and they grow up to be perfect monsters of
uglification, and build hideous yellow brick cottages, and put up
hoardings, and sell Ramaden's Really Boots (in red), and vote
passionately for Wilton Ashby (in blue), and care nothing for the
fields that used to be green and the hedges where once flowers used to
grow. Some people like this, and see nothing to hate in such ugly
waste places as the one, at the wrong end of the town, where the fair
was being held on that never-to-be-forgotten day when Francis, Mavis,
Bernard and Kathleen set out in their best clothes to rescue the
Mermaid because Mermaids "die in captivity."

The fair had none of those stalls and booths which old-fashioned fairs
used to have, where they sold toys, and gilt gingerbread, and carters'
whips, and cups and saucers, and mutton pies, and dolls, and china
dogs, and shell-boxes, and pincushions, and needlecases, and
penholders with views of the Isle of Wight and Winchester Cathedral
inside that you see so bright and plain when you put your eye close to
the little round hole at the top.

The steam roundabouts were there---but hardly a lean back of their
spotted horses was covered by a rider. There were swings, but no one
happened to be swinging. There were no shows, no menagerie, no boxing-
booth, no marionettes. No penny gaff with the spangled lady and the
fat man who beats the drum. Nor were there any stalls. There were
pink-and-white paper whips and bags of dust-coloured minced paper---
the English substitute for confetti, there were little metal tubes of
dirty water to squirt in people's faces, but except for the sale of
these crude instruments for making other people uncomfortable there
was not a stall in the fair. I give you my word, there was not a
single thing that you could buy---no gingerbread, no sweets, no
crockery dogs, not even a halfpenny orange or a bag of nuts. Nor was
there anything to drink---not as much as a lemonade counter or a
ginger-beer stall. The revellers were no doubt drinking elsewhere. A
tomb-like silence reigned---a silence which all the steam roundabout's
hideous hootings only emphasized.

A very dirty-nosed boy, overhearing a hurried council, volunteered the
information that the circus was not yet open.

"Never mind," they told each other---and turned to the side-shows.
These were, all of one character---the arrangement by which you throw
something or roll something at something else, and if you hit the
something you get a prize---the sort of prize that is sold in
Houndsditch at ninepence a gross.

Most of these arrangements are so ordered that to get a prize is
impossible. For instance, a peculiarly offensive row of masks with
open mouths in which pipes are set up. In the golden days of long ago
if you hit a pipe it broke, and you got a "prize" worth--I can't do
sums--put it briefly at the hundred and forty-fourth part of
ninepence. But the children found that when their wooden ball struck
the pipe it didn't break. They wondered why! Then, looking more
closely, they saw that the pipes were not of clay, but of painted
wood. They could never be broken---and the whole thing was a cruel
mockery of hope.

The coconut-shy was not what it used to be either. Once one threw
sticks, three shies a penny. Now it is a penny a shy, with light
wooden balls. You can win a coconut if you happen to hit one that is
not glued on to its support. If you really wish to win one of these
unkindly fruits it is well to stand and watch a little and not to aim
at those coconuts which, when they are hit, fail to fall off the
sticks. Are they glued on? One hopes not. But if they are, who can
wonder or reprove? It is hard to get a living, anyhow.

There was one thing, though, that roused the children's resentment--
chiefly, I think, because its owners were clean and did not look half
starved, so there was no barrier of pity between them and dislike---a
sort of round table sloping up to its centre. On this small objects
were arranged. For a penny you received two hoops. If you could throw
a hoop over an object that object was yours. None of the rustic
visitors to the fair could, it seemed, or cared to. It did not look
difficult, however. Nor was it. At the first shot a tiny candlestick
was encircled. Between pride and shame Mavis held out a hand.

"Hard luck," said one of the two young women, too clean to be pitied.
"Has to go flat on-see?"

Francis tried again. This time the ring encircled a match-box, "flat
on."

"Hard luck," said the lady again.

"What's the matter now?" the children asked, baffled.

"Hoop has to be red side up," said she. So she scored. Now they went
to the other side and had another penn'orth of hoops from the other
too clean young woman. And the same thing happened. Only on the second
winning she said:

"Hard luck. Hoops have to be blue side up.

It was Bernard's blood that was up. He determined to clear the board.

"Blue side up, is it," he said sternly, and took another penn'orth.
This time he--brought down a tin pin-tray and a little box which, I
hope, contained something. The girl hesitated and then handed over the
prizes. "Another penn'orth of hoops," said Bernard, warming to the
work.

"Hard luck," said she. "We don't give more than two penn'orth to any
one party."

The prizes were not the kind of things you care to keep, even as
trophies of victory---especially when you have before you the business
of rescuing a Mermaid. The children gave their prizes to a small
female bystander and went to the shooting gallery. That, at least,
could have no nonsense about it. If you aimed at a bottle and hit it
it would break. No sordid self-seeking custodian could rob you of the
pleasant tinkling of the broken bottle. And even with a poor weapon it
is not impossible to aim at a bottle and hit it. This is true---but at
the shooting gallery the trouble was not to hit the bottles. There
were so many of them and they were so near. The children got thirteen
tinkling smashes for their fourteen shots. The bottles were hung
fifteen feet away instead of thirty.

Why? Space is not valuable at the fair---can it be that the people of
Sussex are such poor shots that thirty feet is to them a prohibitive
distance?

They did not throw for coconuts, nor did they ride on the little
horses or pull themselves to dizzy heights in the swings. There was no
heart left in them for such adventures---and besides everyone in the
fair, saving themselves and the small female bystander and the hoop
girls, was dirtier than you would believe possible. I suppose
Beachfield has a water-supply. But you would have doubted it if you
had been at the fair. They heard no laughter, no gay talk, no hearty
give-and-take of holiday jests. A dull heavy silence brooded over the
place, and you could hear that silence under the shallow insincere
gaiety of the steam roundabout.

Laughter and song, music and good-fellowship, dancing and innocent
revelry, there were none of these at Beacbfield Fair. For music there
was the steam roundabout's echoes of the sordid musical comedy of the
year before the year before last---laughter there was not---nor
revelry---only the dirty guardians of the machines for getting your
pennies stood gloomily huddled, and a few groups of dejected girls and
little boys shivered in the cold wind that had come up with the
sunset. In that wind, too, danced the dust, the straw, the newspaper
and the chocolate wrappers. The only dancing there was. The big tent
that held the circus was at the top of the ground, and the people who
were busy among the ropes and pegs and between the bright vans resting
on their shafts seemed gayer and cleaner than the people who kept the
little arrangements for people not to win prizes at. And now the
circus at last was opened; the flap of the tent was pinned back, and a
gipsy-looking woman, with oily black ringlets and eyes like bright
black beads, came out at the side to take the money of those who
wished to see the circus. People were now strolling towards it in twos
and threes, and of these our four were the very first, and the gipsy
woman took four warm sixpences from their four hands.

"Walk in, walk in, my little dears, and see the white elephant," said
a stout, black-moustached man in evening dress---greenish it was and
shiny about the seams. He flourished a long whip as he spoke, and the
children stopped, although they had paid their sixpences, to hear what
they were to see when they did walk in. "The white elephant--tail,
trunk, and tusks all complete, sixpence only. See the Back Try A or
Camels, or Ships of the Arabs---heavy drinker when he gets the
chance---total abstainer while crossing the desert. Walk up, walk up.
See the Trained Wolves and Wolverines in their great National Dance
with the flags of all countries. Walk up, walk up, walk up. See the
Educated Seals and the Unique Lotus of the Heast in her famous bare-
backed act, riding three horses at once, the wonder and envy of
royalty. Walk up and see the very table Mermaid caught on your own
coast only yesterday as ever was."

"Thank you," said Francis, "I think we will." And the four went
through the opened canvas into the pleasant yellow dusty twilight
which was the inside of a squarish sort of tent, with an opening at
the end, and through that opening you could see the sawdust-covered
ring of the circus and benches all round it, and two men just
finishing covering the front benches with red cotton strips.

"Where's the Mermaid?" Mavis asked a little boy in tights and a
spangled cap.

"In there," he said, pointing to a little canvas door at the side of
the squarish tent. "I don't advise you to touch her, though. Spiteful,
she is. Lashes out with her tails---plashed old Mother Lee all over
water she did,---an' dangerous too: our Bill 'e got 'is bone set out
in his wrist a-trying to hold on to her. An' it's thruppence extry to
see her close."

There are times, as we all know, when threepence extra is a baffling
obstacle---a cruel barrier to desire, but this was not, fortunately,
such a moment. The children had plenty of money, because Mother had
given them two half-crowns between them to spend as they liked.

"Even then," said Bernard, in allusion to the threepence extra, "we
shall have two bob left."

So Mavis, who was treasurer, paid over the extra threepences to a girl
with hair as fair and lank as hemp, and a face as brown and round as a
tea-cake, who sat on a kitchen chair by the Mermaid door. Then one by
one they went in through the narrow opening, and at last there they
were alone in the little canvas room with a tank in it that held--
well, there was a large label, evidently written in a hurry, for the
letters were badly made and arranged quite crookedly, and this label
declared:

REAL LIVE MERMAID.

SAID TO BE FABULUS, BUT NOW TRUE.

CAUGHT HERE.

PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.

DANGEROUS.

The little Spangled Boy had followed them in and pointed to the last
word.

"What I tell you?" he asked proudly.

The children looked at each other. Nothing could be done with this
witness at hand. At least....

"Perhaps if it's going to be magic," Mavis whispered to Francis,
"outsiders wouldn't notice. They don't sometimes---I believe. Suppose
you just said a bit of 'Sabrina' to start the magic."

"Wouldn't be safe," Francis returned in the same low tones. "Suppose
he wasn't an outsider, and did notice."

So there they stood helpless. What the label was hung on was a large
zinc tank--the kind that they have at the tops of houses for the
water-supply---you must have seen one yourself often when the pipes
burst in frosty weather, and your father goes up into the roof of the
house with a candle and pail, and the water drips through the ceilings
and the plumber is sent for, and comes when it suits him. The tank was
full of water and at the bottom of it could be seen a mass of
something dark that looked as if it were partly browny-green fish and
partly greeny-brown seaweed.

"Sabrina fair," Francis suddenly whispered, "send him away."

And immediately a voice from outside called "Rube-Reuben-drat the boy,
where's he got to?"--and the little spangled intruder had to go.

"There, now," said Mavis, "if that isn't magic!"

Perhaps it was, but still the dark fish-and-seaweed heap in the tank
had not stirred. "Say it all through," said Mavis.

"Yes, do," said Bernard, "then we shall know for certain whether it's
a seal or not."

So once again---

  "'Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting.

Under the glassy green, translucent wave...'"

He got no further. There was a heaving and stirring of the seaweed and
fish tail, something gleamed white, through the brown something white
parted the seaweed, two white hands parted it, and a face came to the
surface of the rather dirty water and---there was no doubt about it---
spoke.

"'Translucent wave, indeed!'" was what the face said. "I wonder you're
not ashamed to speak the invocation over a miserable cistern like
this. What do you want?"

Brown hair and seaweed still veiled most of the face, but all the
children, who, after their first start back had pressed close to the
tank again, could see that the face looked exceedingly cross.

"We want," said Francis in a voice that would tremble though he told
himself again and again that be was not a baby and wasn't going to
behave like one--"we want to help you."

"Help me? You?" She raised herself a little more in the tank and
looked contemptuously at them. "Why, don't you know that I am mistress
of all water magic? I can raise a storm that will sweep away this
horrible place and my detestable captors and you with them, and carry
me on the back of a great wave down to the depths of the sea."

"Then why on earth don't you?" Bernard asked.

"Well, I was thinking about it," she said, a little awkwardly, "when
you interrupted with your spells. Well, you've called and I've
answered---now tell me what I can do for you."

"We've told you," said Mavis gently enough, though she was frightfully
disappointed that the Mermaid after having in the handsomest manner
turned out to be a Mermaid, should be such a very short-tempered one.
And when they had talked about her all day and paid the threepence
each extra to see her close, and put on their best white dresses too.
"We've told you---we want to help you. Another Sabrina in the sea told
us to. She didn't tell us anything about you being a magic-mistress.
She just said `they die in captivity.'"

"Well, thank you for coming," said the Mermaid. "If she really said
that it must be one of two things---either the sun is in the House of
Liber---which is impossible at this time of the year---or else the
rope I was caught with must be made of llama's hair; and that's
impossible in these latitudes. Do you know anything about the rope
they caught me with?"

"No," said Bernard and Kathleen. But the others said, "it was a
lariat."

"Ah," said the Mermaid, "my worst fears are confirmed--But who could
have expected a lariat on these shores? But that must have been it.
Now I know why, though I have been on the point of working the magic
of the Great Storm at least five hundred times since my capture, some
unseen influence has always held me back."

"You mean," said Bernard, "you feel that it wouldn't work, so you
didn't try."

A rattling, ripping sound outside, beginning softly, waxed louder and
louder so as almost to drown their voices. It was the drum, and it
announced the beginning of the circus. The Spangled Child put his head
in and said, "Hurry up or you'll miss my Infant Prodigious Act on the
Horse with the Tambourines," and took his head out again.

"Oh, dear," said Mavis, "and we haven't arranged a single thing about
rescuing you.

"No more you have," said the Mermaid carelessly.

"Look here," said Francis, "you do want to be rescued, don't you?"

"Of course I do," replied the Mermaid impatiently, "now I know about
the llama rope. But I can't walk even if they'd let me, and you
couldn't carry me. Couldn't you come at dead of night with a chariot--
I could lift myself into it with your aid---then you could drive
swiftly hence, and driving into the sea I could drop from the chariot
and escape while you swam ashore."

"I don't believe we could---any of it," said Bernard, "let alone
swimming ashore with horses and chariots. Why, Pharaoh himself
couldn't do that, you know." And even Mavis and Francis added
helplessly, "I don't see how we're to get a chariot," and "Do think of
some other way."

"I shall await you," said the lady in the tank with perfect calmness,
"at dead of night."

With that she twisted the seaweed closely round her head and shoulders
and sank slowly to the bottom of the tank. And the children were left
staring blankly at each other, while in the circus tent music sounded
and the soft heavy pad-pad of hoofs on sawdust.

"What shall we do?" Francis broke the silence.

"Go and see the circus, of course," said Bernard.

"Of course we can talk about the chariot afterwards," Mavis admitted.

"There'll be lots of time to talk between now and dead of night," said
Kathleen. "Come on, Bear."

And they went.

There is nothing like a circus for making you forget your anxieties.
It is impossible to dwell on your troubles and difficulties when
performing dogs are displaying their accomplishments, and wolves
dancing their celebrated dance with the flags of all nations, and the
engaging lady who jumps through the paper hoops and comes down
miraculously on the flat back of the white horse, cannot but drive
dull care away, especially from the minds of the young. So that for an
hour and a half---it really was a good circus, and I can't think how
it happened to be at Beachfield Fair at all---a solid slab of
breathless enjoyment was wedged in between the interview with the
Mermaid and the difficult task of procuring for her the chariot she
wanted. But when it was all over and they were part of a hot, tightly
packed crowd pouring out of the dusty tent into the sunshine, their
responsibilities came upon them with renewed force.

"Wasn't the clown ripping?" said Bernard, as they got free of the
crowd.

"I liked the riding-habit lady best, and the horse that went like
that, best," said Kathleen, trying with small pale hands and brown
shod legs to give an example of a horse's conduct during an exhibition
of the haute ecole.

"Didn't you think the elephant--" Mavis was beginning, when Francis
interrupted her.

"About that chariot," he said, and after that they talked of nothing
else. And whatever they said it always came to this in the end, that
they hadn't got a chariot, and couldn't get a chariot, and that anyhow
they didn't suppose there was a chariot to be got, at anyrate in
Beachfield.

"It wouldn't be any good, I suppose," was Kathleen's last and most
helpful suggestion "be the slightest good saying 'Sabrina fair' to a
pumpkin?"

"We haven't got even a pumpkin," Bernard reminded her, "let alone the
rats and mice and lizards that Cinderella had. No, that's no good. But
I'll tell you what." He stopped short. They were near home now---it
was late afternoon, in the road where the talkative yellowhammer
lived. "What about a wheelbarrow?"

"Not big enough," said Francis.

"There's an extra big one in the mill," said Bernard. "Now, look here.
I'm not any good at magic. But Uncle Tom said I was a born general. If
I tell you exactly what to do, will you two do it, and let Cathay and
me off going?"

"Going to sneak out of it?" Francis asked bitterly.

"It isn't. It's not my game at all, and I don't want to play. And if I
do, the whole thing will be muffed---you know it will. I'm so unlucky.
You'd never get out at dead of night without me dropping a boot on the
stairs or sneezing---you know you wouldn't."

Bernard took a sort of melancholy pride in being the kind of boy who
always gets caught. If you are that sort of boy, perhaps that's the
best way to take it. And Francis could not deny that there was
something in what he said. He went on: "Then Kathleen's my special
sister and I'm not going to have her dragged into a row. ("I want to,"
Kathleen put in ungratefully.) So will you and Mavis do it on your own
or not?"

After some discussion, in which Kathleen was tactfully dealt with, it
was agreed that they would. Then Bernard unfolded his plan of
campaign.

"Directly we get home," he said, "we'll begin larking about with that
old wheelbarrow---giving each other rides, and so on, and when it's
time to go in we'll leave it at the far end of the field behind the
old sheep but near the gate. Then it'll be handy for you at dead of
night. You must take towels or something and tie round the wheel so
that it doesn't make a row. You can sleep with my toy alarm under your
pillow and it won't wake anyone but you. You get out through the
dining-room window and in the same way. I'll lend you my new knife,
with three blades and a corkscrew, if you'll take care of it, to cut
the canvas, and go by the back lane that comes out behind where the
circus is, but if you took my advice you wouldn't go at all. She's not
a nice Mermaid at all. I'd rather have had a seal, any day. Hullo,
there's Daddy and Mother. Come on."

They came on.

The programme sketched by Bernard was carried out without a hitch.
Everything went well, only Francis and Mavis were both astonished to
find themselves much more frightened than they had expected to be. Any
really great adventure like the rescuing of a Mermaid does always look
so very much more serious when you carry it out, at night, than it did
when you were planning it in the daytime. Also, though they knew they
were not doing anything wrong, they had an uncomfortable feeling that
Mother and Daddy might not agree with them on that point. And, of
course, they could not ask leave to go and rescue a Mermaid, with a
chariot, at dead of night. It is not the sort of thing you can ask
leave to do, somehow. And the more you explained your reasons the less
grown-up people would think you fitted to conduct such an expedition.

Francis lay down fully dressed, under his nightshirt. And Mavis under
hers wore her short blue skirt and jersey. The alarm, true to its
trust, went off into an ear-splitting whizz and bang under the pillow
of Francis, but no one else heard it. He crept cautiously into Mavis's
room and wakened her, and as they crept down in stockinged feet not a
board creaked. The French window opened without noise, the wheelbarrow
was where they had left it, and they had fortunately brought quite
enough string to bind wads of towels and stockings to the tyre of its
wheel. Also they had not forgotten the knife.

The wheelbarrow was heavy and they rather shrank from imagining how
much heavier it would be when the discontented Mermaid was curled up
in it. However, they took it in turns, and got along all right by the
back lane that comes out above the waste ground where Beaehfield holds
its fairs.

"I hope the night's dead enough," Mavis whispered as the circus came
in sight, looking very white in the starlight, "it's nearly two by now
I should think."

"Quite dead enough, if that's all," said Francis; "but suppose the
gipsies are awake? They do sit up to study astronomy to tell fortunes
with, don't they? Suppose this is their astronomy night? I vote we
leave the barrow here and go and reconnoitre."

They did. Their sand-shoes made no noise on the dewy grass, and
treading very carefully, on tiptoe, they came to the tent. Francis
nearly tumbled over a guy rope; he just saw it in time to avoid it.

"If I'd been Bernard I should have come a beastly noisy cropper over
that," he told himself. They crept round the tent till they came to
the little square bulge that marked the place where the tank was and
the seaweed and the Mermaid.

"They die in captivity, they die in captivity, they die in captivity,"
Mavis kept repeating to herself, trying to keep up her courage by
reminding herself of the desperately urgent nature of the adventure.
"It's a matter of life and death," she told herself,--"life and
death."

And now they picked their way between the pegs and guy ropes and came
quite close to the canvas. Doubts of the strength and silence of the
knife possessed the trembling soul of Francis. Mavis's heart was
beating so thickly that, as she said afterwards, she could hardly hear
herself think. She scratched gently on the canvas, while Francis felt
for the knife with the three blades and the corkscrew. An answering
signal from the imprisoned Mermaid would, she felt, give her fresh
confidence. There was no answering scratch. Instead, a dark line
appeared to run up the canvas---it was an opening made by the two
hands of the Mermaid which held back the two halves of the tent-side,
cut neatly from top to bottom. Her white face peered out.

"Where is the chariot?" she asked in the softest of whispers, but not
too soft to carry to the children the feeling that she was, if
possible, crosser than ever.

Francis was afraid to answer. He knew that his voice could never be
subdued to anything as soft as the voice that questioned him, a voice
like the sound of tiny waves on a summer night, like the whisper of
wheat when the wind passes through it on a summer morning. But he
pointed towards the lane where they had left the wheelbarrow and he
and Mavis crept away to fetch it.

As they wheeled it down the waste place both felt how much they owed
to Bernard. But for his idea of muffling the wheel they could never
have got the clumsy great thing down that bumpy uneven slope. But as
it was they and the barrow stole towards the gipsy's tent as silently
as the Arabs in the poem stole away with theirs, and they wheeled it
close to the riven tent side. Then Mavis scratched again, and again
the tent opened.

"Have you any cords?" the soft voice whispered, and Francis pulled
what was left of the string from his pocket.

She had made two boles in the tent side, and now passing the string
through these she tied back the flaps of the tent.

"Now," she said, raising herself in the tank and resting her hands on
its side. "You must both help---take hold of my tail and lift. Creep
in---one on each side."

It was a wet, sloppy, slippery, heavy business, and Mavis thought her
arms would break, but she kept saying: "Die in captivity," and just as
she was feeling that she could not bear it another minute the strain
slackened and there was the Mermaid curled up in the barrow.

"Now," said the soft voice, "go---quickly."

It was all very well to say go quickly. It was as much as the two
children could do, with that barrow-load of dripping Mermaid, to go at
all. And very, very slowly they crept up the waste space. In the lane,
under cover of the tall hedges, they paused.

"Go on," said the Mermaid.

"We can't till we've rested a bit," said Mavis, panting. "How did you
manage to get that canvas cut?"

"My shell knife, of course," said the person in the wheelbarrow. "We
always carry one in our hair, in case of sharks."

"I see," said Francis, breathing heavily.

"You had much better go on," said the barrow's occupant. "This chariot
is excessively uncomfortable and much too small. Besides, delays are
dangerous."

"We'll go in half a sec.," said Francis, and Mavis added kindly

"You're really quite safe now, you know."

"You aren't," said the Mermaid. "I don't know whether you realize that
I'm stolen property and that it will be extremely awkward for you if
you are caught with me."

"But we shan't be caught with you," said Mavis hopefully.

"Everybody's sound asleep," said Francis. It was wonderful how brave
and confident they felt now that the deed was done. "It's perfectly
safe.--Oh, what's that! Oh!"

A hand had shot from the black shadow of the hedge and caught him by
the arm.

"What is it, France? What is it?" said Mavis, who could not see what
was happening.

"What is it--now what is it?" asked the Mermaid more crossly than she
had yet spoken.

"Who is it? Oh, who is it?" gasped Francis, writhing in the grip of
his invisible assailant. And from the dark shadow of the hedge came
the simple and terrible reply--

"The police!"



CHAPTER IV. GRATITUDE

IT is hardly possible to imagine a situation less attractive than that
of Mavis and Francis--even the position of the Mermaid curled up in a
dry barrow and far from her native element was not exactly luxurious.
Still, she was no worse off than she had been when the lariat first
curled itself about her fishy extremity. But the children! They had
braved the terrors of night in an adventure of singular courage and
daring, they had carried out their desperate enterprise, the Mermaid
was rescued, and success seemed near--no further off than the sea
indeed, and that, in point of fact, was about a quarter of a mile
away. To be within a quarter of a mile of achievement, and then to
have the cup of victory dashed from your lips, the crown of victory
torn from your brow by--the police!

It was indeed hard. And what was more, it was dangerous.

"We shall pass the night in the cells," thought Mavis, in agony; "and
whatever will Mother do when she finds we're gone?" In her mind "the
cells" were underground dungeons, dark and damp and vaulted, where
toads and lizards crawled, and no daylight ever penetrated. That is
how dungeons are described in books about the Inquisition.

When the voice from the bush had said "The police," a stricken silence
followed. The mouth of Francis felt dry inside, just as if he had been
eating cracknels, he explained afterwards, and he had to swallow
nothing before he could say:

"What for?"

"Let go his arm," said Mavis to the hidden foe. "We won't run away.
Really we won't."

"You can't," said the Mermaid. "You can't leave me."

"Leave go," said Francis, wriggling. And then suddenly Mavis made a
dart at the clutching hand and caught it by the wrist and whispered
savagely:

"It's not a policeman at all. Come out of that bush-come out," and
dragged. And something did come out of the bush. Something that
certainly was not a policeman. It was small and thin, whereas
policemen are almost always tall and stout. It did not wear the blue
coats our Roberts wear, but velveteen knickerbockers and a tweed
jacket. It was, in fact, a very small boy.

Francis broke into a cackle of relief.

"You little--animal," he said. "What a fright you gave me."

"Animal yourself, if you come to that, let alone her and her tail,"
the boy answered; and Mavis thought his voice didn't sound unfriendly.
"My! but I did take a rise out of you that time, eh? Ain't she bit you
yet, nor yet strook you with that there mackerel-end of hers?"

And then they recognized him. It was the little Spangled Boy. Only
now, of course, being off duty he was no more spangled than you and I
are.

"Whatever did you do it for?" Mavis asked crossly. "It was horrid of
you."

"It wasn't only just a lark," said the boy. "I cut round and listened
this afternoon when you was jawing, and I thought why not be in it?
Only I do sleep that heavy, what with the riding and the tumbling and
all. So I didn't wake till you'd got her out and then I cut up along
ahind the hedge to be beforehand with you. An' I was. It was a fair
cop, matey, eh?"

"What are you going to do about it?" Francis asked flatly; "tell your
father?" But Mavis reflected that he didn't seem to have told his
father yet, and perhaps wouldn't.

"Ain't got no father," said the Spangled Boy, "nor yet mother."

"If you are rested enough you'd better go on," said the Mermaid. "I'm
getting dry through."

And Mavis understood that to her that was as bad as getting wet
through would be to us.

"I'm so sorry," she said gently, "but-"

"I must say I think it's very inconsiderate of you to keep me all this
time in the dry," the Mermaid went on. "I really should have thought
that even you-"

But Francis interrupted her.

"What are you going to do?" he asked the Spangled Boy. And that
surprising child answered, spitting on his hands and rubbing them:

"Do? Why, give a 'and with the barrer."

The Mermaid put out a white arm and touched him.

"You are a hero," she said. "I can recognize true nobility even under
a once--spangled exterior. You may kiss my hand."

"Well, of all the.." said Francis.

"Shall I?" the boy asked, more of himself than of the others.

"Do," Mavis whispered. "Anything to keep her in a good temper."

So the Spangled Boy kissed the still dampish hand of the Lady from the
Sea, took the handles of the barrow and off they all went.

Mavis and Francis were too thankful for this unexpected help to ask
any questions, though they could not help wondering exactly what it
felt like to be a boy who did not mind stealing his own father's
Mermaid. It was the boy himself who offered, at the next rest-halt, an
explanation.

"You see," he said, "it's like this here. This party in the barrow--"

"I know you don't mean it disrespectfully," said the Mermaid, sweetly;
"but not party and not a barrow."

"Lady," suggested Mavis.

"This lydy in the chariot, she'd been kidnapped---that's how I look at
it. Same as what I was."

This was romance indeed; and Mavis recognized it and said:

"You kidnapped? I say!"

"Yus," said Spangles, "when I was a baby kid. Old Mother Romaine told
me, just afore she was took all down one side and never spoke no
more."

"But why?" Mavis asked. "I never could understand in the books why
gipsies kidnapped babies. They always seem to have so many of their
own---far, far more than anyone could possibly want."

"Yes, indeed," said the Mermaid, "they prodded at me with sticks---a
multitude of them."

"It wasn't kids as was wanted," said the boy, "it was revenge. That's
what Mother Romaine said--my father--he was a sort of Beak, so he give
George Lee eighteen months for poaching. An' the day they took him the
church bells was ringing like mad, and George, as he was being took,
he said: `What's all that row? It ain't Sunday.' And then they tells
him as how the bells was ringing 'cause him that was the Beak--my
father, you know,--he'd got a son and hare. And that was me. You
wouldn't think it to look at me," he added, spitting pensively and
taking up the barrow handles, "but I'm a son and hare."

"And then what happened?" Mavis asked as they trudged on.

"Oh, George--he done his time, and I was a kiddy then, year-and-a-half
old, all lace and ribbons and blue shoes made of glove-stuff, and
George pinched me, and it makes me breff short, wheeling and talking."

"Pause and rest, my spangled friend," said the Mermaid in a voice of
honey, "and continue your thrilling narrative."

"There ain't no more to it," said the boy, "except that I got one of
the shoes. Old Mother Romaine 'ad kep' it, and a little shirt like a
lady's handkercher, with R.V. on it in needlework. She didn't ever
tell me what part of the country my dad was Beak in. Said she'd tell
me next day. An' then there wasn't no next day for her---not for
telling things in, there wasn't."

He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes.

"She wasn't half a bad sort," he explained.

"Don't cry," said Mavis unwisely.

"Cry? Me?" he answered scornfully. "I've got a cold in me 'ead. You
oughter know the difference between a cold in the head and snivelling.
You been to school, I lay?--they might have taught you that."

"I wonder the gipsies didn't take the shoe and the shirt away from
you?"

"Nobody know'd I'd got'em; I always kep' 'em inside my shirt, wrapt up
in a bit of paper, and when I put on me tights I used to hide 'em. I'm
a-going to take the road one of these days, and find out who it was
lost a kid with blue shoes and shirt nine years come April."

"Then you're ten and a half," said Mavis.

And the boy answered admiringly:

"How do you do it in your head so quick, miss? Yes, that's what I am."

Here the wheelbarrow resumed its rather bumpety progress, and nothing
more could be said till the next stoppage, which was at that spot
where the sea-front road swings round and down, and glides into the
beach so gently that you can hardly tell where one begins and the
other ends. It was much lighter there than up on the waste space. The
moon was just breaking through a fluffy white cloud and cast a
trembling sort of reflection on the sea. As they came down the slope
all hands were needed to steady the barrow, because as soon as she saw
the sea the Mermaid began to jump up and down like a small child at a
Christmas Tree.

"Oh, look!" she cried, "isn't it beautiful? Isn't it the only home in
the world?"

"Not quite," said the boy.

"Ah!" said the lady in the barrow, "of course you're heir to one of
the--what is it...?"

"'Stately homes of England,---how beautiful they stand,'" said Mavis.

"Yes," said the lady. "I knew by instinct that he was of noble birth."

"'I bid ye take care of the brat,' said he.

'For he comes of a noble race,'"

Francis hummed. He was feeling a little cross and sore. He and Mavis
had had all the anxious trouble of the adventure, and now the Spangled
Boy was the only one the Mermaid was nice to. It was certainly hard.

"But your stately home would not do for me at all," she went on. "My
idea of home is all seaweed of coral and pearl---so cosy and
delightful and wet. Now---can you push the chariot to the water's
edge, or will you carry me?"

"Not much we won't," the Spangled Boy answered firmly. "We'll push you
as far as we can, and then you'll have to wriggle."

"I will do whatever you suggest," she said amiably; "but what is this
wriggle of which you speak?"

"Like a worm," said Francis.

"Or an eel," said Mavis.

"Nasty low things," said the Mermaid; and the children never knew
whether she meant the worm and the eel, or the girl and the boy.

"Now then. All together," said the Spangled Child. And the barrow
bumped down to the very edge of the rocks. And at the very edge its
wheel caught in a chink and the barrow went sideways. Nobody could
help it, but the Mermaid was tumbled out of her chariot on to the
seaweed.

The seaweed was full and cushiony and soft, and she was not hurt at
all,--but she was very angry.

"You have been to school," she said, "as my noble preserver reminds
you. You might have learned how not to upset chariots."

"It's we who are your preservers," Francis couldn't help saying.

"Of course you are," she said coolly, "plain preservers. Not noble
ones. But I forgive you. You can't help being common and clumsy. I
suppose it's your nature--just as it's his to be..."

"Good-bye," said Francis, firmly.

"Not at all," said the lady. "You must come with me in case there are
any places where I can't exercise the elegant and vermiform
accomplishment you spoke about. Now, one on each side, and one behind,
and don't walk on my tail. You can't think how annoying it is to have
your tail walked on."

"Oh, can't I," said Mavis. "I'll tell you something. My mother has a
tail too."

"I say!" said Francis.

But the Spangled Child understood.

"She don't wear it every day, though," he said; and Mavis is almost
sure that he winked. Only it is so difficult to be sure about winks in
the starlight.

"Your mother must be better born than I supposed," said the Mermaid.
"Are you quite sure about the tail?"

"I've trodden on it often," said Mavis--and then Francis saw.

Wriggling and sliding and pushing herself along by her hands, and
helped now and then by the hands of the others, the Mermaid was at
last got to the edge of the water.

"How glorious! In a moment I shall be quite wet," she cried.

In a moment everyone else was quite wet also---for, with a movement
that was something between a squirm and a jump, she dropped from the
edge with a splashing flop.

And disappeared entirely.



CHAPTER V. CONSEQUENCES

THE three children looked at each other.

"Well!" said Mavis.

"I do think she's ungrateful," said Francis.

"What did you expect?" asked the Spangled Child.

They were all wet through. It was very late--they were very tired, and
the clouds were putting the moon to bed in a very great hurry. The
Mermaid was gone; the whole adventure was ended.

There was nothing to do but to go home, and go to sleep, knowing that
when they woke the next morning it would be to a day in the course of
which they would have to explain their wet clothes to their parents.

"Even you'll have to do that," Mavis reminded the Spangled Boy.

He received her remark in what they afterwards remembered to have been
a curiously deep silence.

"I don't know how on earth we are to explain," said Francis. "I really
don't. Come on---let's get home. No more adventures for me, thank you.
Bernard knew what he was talking about."

Mavis, very tired indeed, agreed.

They had got over the beach by this time, recovered the wheelbarrow,
and trundled it up and along the road. At the corner the Spangled Boy
suddenly said:

"Well then, so long, old sports," and vanished down a side lane.

The other two went on together---with the wheelbarrow, which, I may
remind you, was as wet as any of them.

They went along by the hedge and the mill and up to the house.

Suddenly Mavis clutched at her brother's arm.

"There's a light," she said, "in the house."

There certainly was, and the children experienced that terrible empty
sensation only too well known to all of us---the feeling of the
utterly-found-out.

They could not be sure which window it was, but it was a downstairs
window, partly screened by ivy. A faint hope still buoyed up Francis
of getting up to bed unnoticed by whoever it was that had the light;
and he and his sister crept round to the window out of which they had
crept; but such a very long time ago it seemed. The window was shut.

Francis suggested hiding in the mill and trying to creep in unobserved
later on, but Mavis said:

"No. I'm too tired for anything. I'm too tired to live, I think. Let's
go and get it over, and then we can go to bed and sleep, and sleep,
and sleep."

So they went and peeped in at the kitchen window, and there was no one
but Mrs Pearce, and she had a fire lighted and was putting a big pot
on it.

The children went to the back door and opened it.

"You're early, for sure," said Mrs Pearce, not turning.

This seemed a bitter sarcasm. It was too much. Mavis answered it with
a sob. And at that Mrs Pearce turned very quickly.

"What to gracious!" she said---"whatever to gracious is the matter?
Where've you been?" She took Mavis by the shoulder. "Why, you're all
sopping wet. You naughty, naughty little gell, you. Wait till I tell
your Ma---been shrimping I lay,---or trying to---never asking when the
tide was right. And not a shrimp to show for it, I know, with the tide
where it is. You wait till we hear what your Ma's got to say about it.
And look at my clean flags and you dripping all over 'em like a
fortnight's wash in wet weather."

Mavis twisted a little in Mrs Pearce's grasp.

"Oh, don't scold us, dear Mrs Pearce," she said, putting a wet arm up
towards Mrs Pearce's neck. "We are so miserable."

"And so you deserve to be," said Mrs Pearce, smartly. "Here, young
chap, you go into the wash-house and get them things off, and drop
them outside the door, and have a good rub with the jack-towel; and
little miss can undress by the fire and put hern in this clean pail---
and I'll pop up soft-like and so as your Ma don't hear, and bring you
down something dry."

A gleam of hope fell across the children's hearts,--a gleam wild and
watery as that which the moonlight had cast across the sea, into which
the Mermaid had disappeared. Perhaps after all Mrs Pearce wasn't going
to tell Mother. If she was, why should she pop up soft-like? Perhaps
she would keep their secret. Perhaps she would dry their clothes.
Perhaps, after all, that impossible explanation would never have to be
given.

The kitchen was a pleasant place, with bright brasses and shining
crockery, and a round three-legged table with a clean cloth and blue-
and-white teacups on it.

Mrs Pearce came down with their nightgowns and the warm dressing-gowns
that Aunt Enid had put in in spite of their expressed wishes. How glad
they were of them now!

"There, that's a bit more like," said Mrs Pearce; "here, don't look as
if I was going to eat you, you little Peter Grievouses. I'll hot up
some milk and here's a morsel of bread and dripping to keep the cold
out. Lucky for you I was up---getting the boys' breakfast ready. The
boats'll be in directly. The boys will laugh when I tell them---laugh
fit to bust theirselves they will."

"Oh, don't tell," said Mavis, "don't, please don't. Please, please
don't."

"Well, I like that," said Mrs Pearce, pouring herself some tea from a
hot which, the children learned later, stood on the hob all day and
most of the night; "it's the funniest piece I've heard this many a
day. Shrimping at high-tide!"

"I thought," said Mavis, "perhaps you'd forgive us, and dry our
clothes, and not tell anybody."

"Oh, you did, did you? " said Mrs Pearce. "Anything else--?"

"No, nothing else, thank you," said Mavis, "only I want to say thank
you for being so kind, and it isn't high-tide yet, and please we
haven't done any harm to the barrow---but I'm afraid it's rather wet,
and we oughtn't to have taken it without asking, I know, but you were
in bed and-"

"The barrow?" Mrs Pearce repeated, "that great hulking barrow---you
took the barrow to bring the shrimps home in ? No---I can't keep it to
myself---that really I can't-" she lay back in the arm-chair and shook
with silent laughter.

The children looked at each other. It is not pleasant to be laughed
at, especially for something you have never done--but they both felt
that Mrs Pearce would have laughed quite as much, or even more, if
they had told her what it really was they had wanted the barrow for.

"Oh, don't go on laughing," said Mavis, creeping close to Mrs Pearce,
"though you are a ducky darling not to be cross any more. And you
won't tell, will you?"

"Ah well---I'll let you off this time. But you'll promise faithful
never to do it again, now, won't you?"

"We faithfully won't ever," said both children, earnestly.

"Then off you go to your beds, and I'll dry the things when your Ma's
out. I'll press 'em to-morrow morning while I'm waiting for the boys
to come in."

"You are an angel," said Mavis, embracing her.

"More than you are then, you young limbs," said Mrs Pearce, returning
the embrace. "Now off you go, and get what sleep you can."

It was with a feeling that Fate had not, after all, been unduly harsh
with them that Mavis and Francis came down to a very late breakfast.

"Your Ma and Pa's gone off on their likes," said Mrs Pearce, bringing
in the eggs and bacon,--"won't be back till dinner. So I let you have
your sleep out. The little 'uns had theirs three hours ago and out on
the sands. I told them to let you sleep, though I know they wanted to
hear how many shrimps you caught. I lay they expected a barrowful,
same as what you did."

"How did you know they knew we'd been out?" Francis asked.

"Oh, the way they was being secret in corners, and looking the old
barrow all over was enough to make a cat laugh. Hurry up, now. I've
got the washing-up to do-and your things is well-nigh dry."

"You are a darling," said Mavis. "Suppose you'd been different,
whatever would have become of us?"

"You'd a got your deserts---bed and bread and water, instead of this
nice egg and bacon and the sands to play on. So now you know," said
Mrs Pearce.

.....

On the sands they found Kathleen and Bernard, and it really now, in
the bright warm sunshine, seemed almost worth while to have gone
through last night's adventures, if only for the pleasure of telling
the tale of them to the two who had been safe and warm and dry in bed
all the time.

"Though really," said Mavis, when the tale was told, "sitting here and
seeing the tents and the children digging, and the ladies knitting,
and the gentlemen smoking and throwing stones, it does hardly seem as
though there could be any magic. And yet, you know, there was."

"It's like I told you about radium and things," said Bernard. "Things
aren't magic because they haven't been found out yet. There's always
been Mermaids, of course, only people didn't know it."

"But she talks," said Francis.

"Why not?" said Bernard placidly. "Even parrots do that."

"But she talks English," Mavis urged.

"Well," said Bernard, unmoved, "what would you have had her talk?"

And so, in pretty sunshine, between blue sky and good sands, the
adventure of the Mermaid seemed to come to an end, to be now only as a
tale that is told. And when the four went slowly home to dinner all
were, I think, a little sad that this should be so.

"Let's go round and have a look at the empty barrow," Mavis said;
"it'll bring it all back to us, and remind us of what was in it, like
ladies' gloves and troubadours."

The barrow was where they had left it, but it was not empty. A very
dirty piece of folded paper lay in it, addressed in pencilled and
uncertain characters :--

"TO FRANCE."

"TO BE OPENED."

Francis opened it and read aloud:--

"I went back and she came back and she wants you to come back at ded
of nite.

"RUBE."

"Well, I shan't go," said Francis.

A voice from the bush by the gate male them all start.

"Don't let on you see me," said the Spangled Boy, putting his head out
cautiously.

"You seem very fond of hiding in bushes," said Francis.

"I am," said the boy briefly. "Ain't you going---to see her again, I
mean?"

"No," said Francis, "I've had enough dead of night to last me a long
time."

"You a-going, miss?" the boy asked. "No? You are a half-livered crew.
It'll be only me, I suppose."

"You're going, then,?"

"Well," said the boy, "what do you think?"

"I should go if I were you," said Bernard impartially.

"No, you wouldn't; not if you were me," said Francis. "You don't know
how disagreeable she was. I'm fed up with her. And besides, we simply
can't get out at dead of night now. Mrs Pearce'll be on the look-out.
No---it's no go."

"But you must manage it somehow," said Kathleen; "you can't let it
drop like this. I shan't believe it was magic at all if you do."

"If you were us, you'd have had enough of magic," said Francis. "Why
don't you go yourselves---you and Bernard."

"I've a good mind to," said Bernard unexpectedly. "Only not in the
middle of the night, because of my being certain to drop my boots.
Would you come, Cathay?"

"You know I wanted to before," said Kathleen reproachfully.

"But how?" the others asked.

"Oh," said Bernard, "we must think about that. I say, you chap, we
must get to our dinner. Will you be be here after?"

"Yes. I ain't going to move from here. You might bring me a bit of
grub with you-I ain't had a bite since yesterday tea-time."

"I say," said Francis kindly, "did they stop your grub to punish you
for getting wet."

"They didn't know nothing about my getting wet," he said darkly. "I
didn't never go back to the tents. I've cut my lucky, I 'ave 'ooked
it, skedaddled, done a bunk, run away."

"And where are you going?"

"I dunno," said the Spangled Boy. "I'm running from, not to."



CHAPTER VI. THE MERMAIDS HOME

THE parents of Mavis, Francis, Kathleen and Bernard were extremely
sensible people. If they had not been, this story could never have
happened. They were as jolly as any father and mother you ever met,
but they were not always fussing and worrying about their children,
and they understood perfectly well that children do not care to be
absolutely always under the parental eye. So that, while there were
always plenty of good times in which the whole family took part, there
were also times when Father and Mother went off together and enjoyed
themselves in their own grown-up way, while the children enjoyed
themselves in theirs. It happened that on this particular afternoon
there was to be a concert at Lymington--Father and Mother were going.
The children were asked whether they would like to go, and replied
with equal courtesy and firmness.

"Very well then," said Mother, "you do whatever you like best. I
should play on the shore, I think, if I were you. Only don't go round
the corner of the cliff, because that's dangerous at high-tide. It's
safe so long as you're within sight of the coastguards. Anyone have
any more pie? No--then I think I'll run and dress."

"Mother," said Kathleen suddenly, "may we take some pie and things to
a little boy who said he hadn't had anything to eat since yesterday?"

"Where is he?" Father asked.

Kathleen blushed purple, but Mavis cautiously replied, "Outside. I'm
sure we shall be able to find him."

"Very well," said Mother, "and you might ask Mrs Pearce to give you
some bread and cheese as well. Now, I must simply fly."

"Cathay and I'll help you, Mother," said Mavis, and escaped the
further questioning she saw in her father's eye. The boys had slipped
away at the first word of what seemed to be Kathleen's amazing
indiscretion about the waiting Rube.

"It was quite all right," Kathleen argued later, as they went up the
field, carefully carrying a plate of plum pie and the bread and cheese
with not so much care and a certain bundle not carefully at all. "I
saw flying in Mother's eye before I spoke. And if you can ask leave
before you do a thing it's always safer."

"And look here," said Mavis. "If the Mermaid wants to see us we've
only got to go down and say 'Sabrina fair,' and she's certain to turn
up. If it's just seeing us she wants, and not another deadly-night
adventure."

Reuben did not eat with such pretty manners as yours, perhaps, but
there was no doubt about his enjoyment of the food they had brought,
though he only stopped eating for half a second, to answer, "Prime.
Thank you," to Kathleen's earnest inquiries.

"Now," said Francis when the last crumb of cheese had disappeared and
the last trace of plum juice had been licked from the spoon (a tin
one, because, as Mrs Pearce very properly said, you never know),--
"now, look here. We're going straight down to the shore to try and see
her. And if you like to come with us we can disguise you."

"What in?" Reuben asked. "I did disguise myself once in a false beard
and a green-coloured moustache, but it didn't take no one in for a
moment, not even the dogs."

"We thought," said Mavis gently, "that perhaps the most complete
disguise for you would be girl's clothes--because," she added hastily
to dispel the thundercloud on Reuben's brow--"because you're such a
manly boy. Nobody would give vent to a moment's suspicion. It would be
so very unlike you."

"G'a long-" said the Spangled Child, his dignity only half soothed.

"And I've brought you some of my things and some sand-shoes of
France's, because, of course, mine are just kiddy shoes."

At that Reuben burst out laughing and then hummed: "'Go, flatterer,
go, I'll not trust to thy, vow,'" quite musically.

"Oh, do you know the 'Gipsy Countess'? How jolly!" said Kathleen.

"Old Mother Romaine knew a power of songs," he said, suddenly grave.
"Come on, chuck us in the togs."

"You just take off your coat and come out and I'll help you dress up,"
was Francis's offer.

"Best get a skirt over my kicksies first," said Reuben, "case anyone
comes by and recognizes the gipsy cheild. Hand us in the silk attire
and jewels have to spare."

They pushed the blue serge skirt and jersey through the branches which
he held apart.

"Now the 'at," he said, reaching a hand for it. But the hat was too
large for the opening in the bush, and he had to come out of it. The
moment he was out the girls crowned him with the big rush-hat, round
whose crown a blue scarf was twisted, and Francis and Bernard each
seizing a leg, adorned those legs with brown stockings and white sand-
shoes. Reuben, the spangled runaway from the gipsy camp, stood up
among his new friends a rather awkward and quite presentable little
girl.

"Now," he said, looking down at his serge skirts with a queer smile,
"now we shan't be long."

Nor were they. Thrusting the tin spoon and the pie-plate and the
discarded boots of Reuben into the kind shelter of the bush they made
straight for the sea.

When they got to that pleasant part of the shore which is smooth sand
and piled shingle, lying between low rocks and high cliffs, Bernard
stopped short.

"Now, look here," he said, "if Sabrina fair turns up trumps I don't
mind going on with the adventure, but I won't do it if Kathleen's to
be in it."

"It's not fair," said Kathleen; "you said I might."

"Did I? "--Bernard most handsomely referred the matter to the others.

"Yes, you did," said Francis shortly. Mavis said "Yes," and Reuben
clinched the matter by saying, "Why, you up and asked her yourself if
she'd go along of you."

"All right," said Bernard calmly. "Then I shan't go myself. That's
all."

"Oh, bother," said at least three of the five; and Kathleen said: "I
don't see why I should always be out of everything."

"Well," said Mavis impatiently, "after all, there's no danger in just
trying to see the Mermaid. You promise you won't do anything if
Bernard says not--that'll do, I suppose? Though why you should be a
slave to him just because he chooses to say you're his particular
sister, I don't see. Will that do, Bear?"

"I'll promise anything," said Kathleen, almost in tears, "if you'll
only let me come with you all and see the Mermaid if she turns out to
be seeable."

So that was settled.

Now came the question of where the magic words should be said.

Mavis and Francis voted for the edge of the rocks where the words had
once already been so successfully spoken. Bernard said, "Why not here
where we are?" Kathleen said rather sadly that any place would do as
long as the Mermaid came when she was called. But Reuben, standing
sturdily in his girl's clothes, said:

"Look 'ere. When you've run away like what I have, least said soonest
mended, and out of sight's out of mind. What about caves?"

"Caves are too dry, except at high-tide," said Francis. "And then
they're too wet. Much."

"Not all caves," Reuben reminded him. "If we was to turn and go up by
the cliff path. There's a cave up there. I hid in it t'other day.
Quite dry, except in one corner, and there it's as wet as you want--a
sort of 'orse trough in the rocks it looks like--only deep."

"Is it sea-water?" Mavis asked anxiously. And Reuben said:

"Bound to be, so near the sea and all."

But it wasn't. For when they had climbed the cliff path and Reuben had
shown them where to turn aside from it, and had put aside the brambles
and furze that quite hid the cave's mouth, Francis saw at once that
the water here could not be sea-water. It was too far above the line
which the waves reached, even in the stormiest weather.

"So it's no use," he explained.

But the others said, "Oh, do let's try, now we are here," and they
went on into the dusky twilight of the cave.

It was a very pretty cave, not chalk, like the cliffs, but roofed and
walled with grey flints such as the houses and churches are built of
that you see on the downs near Brighton and Eastbourne.

"This isn't an accidental cave, you know," said Bernard importantly;
"it's built by the hand of man in distant ages, like Stonehenge and
the Cheesewring and Kit's Coty House."

The cave was lighted from the entrance where the sunshine crept
faintly through the brambles. Their eyes soon grew used to the gloom
and they could see that the floor of the cave was of dry white sand,
and that along one end was a narrow dark pool of water. Ferns fringed
its edge and drooped their fronds to its smooth surface--a surface
which caught a gleam of light, and shone whitely; but the pool was
very still, and they felt somehow, without knowing why, very deep.

"It's no good, no earthly," said Francis.

"But it's an awfully pretty cave," said Mavis consolingly. "Thank you
for showing it to us, Reuben. And it's jolly cool. Do let's rest a
minute or two. I'm simply boiling, climbing that cliff path. We'll go
down to the sea in a minute. Reuben could wait here if he felt safer."

"All right, squattez-vous," said Bernard, and the children sat down at
the water's edge, Reuben still very awkward in his girl's clothes.

It was very, very quiet. Only now and then one fat drop of water would
fall from the cave's roof into that quiet pool and just move its
surface in a spreading circle.

"It's a ripping place for a hidey-hole," said Bernard, "better than
that old bush of yours, anyhow. I don't believe anybody knows of the
way in."

"I don't think anyone does, either," said Reuben, "because there
wasn't any way in till it fell in two days ago, when I was trying to
dig up a furze root."

"I should hide here if you want to hide," said Bernard.

"I mean to," said Reuben.

"Well, if you're rested, let's get on," Francis said; but Kathleen
urged:

"Do let's say 'Sabrina fair,' first--just to try!"

So they said it--all but the Spangled Child who did not know it--

  "'Sabrina fair,

Listen where thou art sitting.

Under the glassy green...'"

There was a splash and a swirl in the pool, and there was the Mermaid
herself, sure enough. Their eyes had grown used to the dusk and they
could see her quite plainly, could see too that she was holding out
her arms to them and smiling so sweetly that it almost took their
breath away.

"My cherished preservers," she cried, "my dear, darling, kind, brave,
noble, unselfish dears!"

"You're talking to Reuben, in the plural, by mistake, I suppose," said
Francis, a little bitterly.

"To him, too, of course. But you two most of all," she said, swishing
her tail round and leaning her hands on the edge of the pool. "I am so
sorry I was so ungrateful the other night. I'll tell you how it was.
It's in your air. You see, coming out of the water we're very
susceptible to aerial influences--and that sort of ungratefulness and,
what's the word-?"

"Snobbishness," said Francis firmly.

"Is that what you call it?--is most frightfully infectious, and your
air's absolutely crammed with the germs of it. That's why I was so
horrid. You do forgive me, don't you, dears? And I was so selfish,
too-----oh, horrid. But it's all washed off now, in the nice clean
sea, and I'm as sorry as if it had been my fault, which it really and
truly wasn't."

The children said all right, and she wasn't to mind, and it didn't
matter, and all the things you say when people say they are sorry, and
you cannot kiss them and say, "Right oh," which is the natural answer
to such confessions.

"It was very curious," she said thoughtfully, "a most odd experience,
that little boy... his having been born of people who had always been
rich, really seemed to me to be important. I assure you it did. Funny,
wasn't it? And now I want you all to come home with me, and see where
I live."

She smiled radiantly at them, and they all said, "Thank you," and
looked at each other rather blankly.

"All our people will be unspeakably pleased to see you. We Mer-people
are not really ungrateful. You mustn't think that," she said
pleadingly.

She looked very kind, very friendly. But Francis thought of the
Lorelei. Just so kind and friendly must the Lady of the Rhine have
looked to the "sailor in a little skiff" whom he had disentangled from
Heine's poem, last term, with the aid of the German dicker. By a
curious coincidence and the same hard means, Mavis had, only last
term, read of Undine, and she tried not to think that there was any
lack of soul in the Mermaid's kind eyes. Kathleen who, by another
coincidence, had fed her fancy in English literature on the "Forsaken
Merman" was more at ease.

"Do you mean down with you under the sea?" she asked--

  "'where the sea-snakes coil and twine.

   Dry their mail and bask in the brine.

   Where great whales go sailing by.

   Sail and sail with unshut eye

   Round the world for ever and aye?'"

"Well, it's not exactly like that, really," said the Mermaid; "but
you'll see soon enough."

This had, in Bernard's ears, a sinister ring.

"Why," he asked suddenly, "did you say you wanted to see us at dead of
night?"

"It's the usual time, isn't it?" she asked, looking at him with
innocent surprise. "It is in all the stories. You know we have air-
stories just as you have fairy-stories and water stories,---and the
rescuer almost always comes to the castle gate at dead of night, on a
coalblack steed or a dapple-grey, you know, or a red-roan steed of
might; but as there were four of you, besides me and my tail, I
thought it more considerate to suggest a chariot. Now, we really ought
to be going."

"Which way?" asked Bernard, and every one held their breath to hear
the answer.

"The way I came, of course," she answered, "down here,"--and she
pointed to the water that rippled round her.

"Thank you so very, very much," said Mavis, in a voice which trembled
a little; "but I don't know whether you've heard that people who go
down into the water like that--people like us--without tails, you
know--they get drowned."

"Not if they're personally conducted," said the Mermaid. "Of course we
can't be responsible for trespassers, though even with them I don't
think anything very dreadful has ever happened. Some one once told me
a story about Water Babies. Did you never hear of that?"

"Yes, but that was a made-up story," said Bernard stolidly.

"Yes, of course," she agreed, "but a great deal of it's quite true,
all the same. But you won't grow fins and gills or anything like that.
You needn't be afraid."

The children looked at each other, and then all looked at Francis. He
spoke.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you very much, but we would rather not---
much rather."

"Oh, nonsense," said the lady kindly. "Look here, it's as easy as
easy. I give you each a lock of my hair," she cut off the locks with
her shell knife as she spoke, long locks they were and soft. "Look
here, tie these round your necks,--if I'd had a lock of human hair
round my neck I should never have suffered from the dryness as I did.
And then just jump in. Keep your eyes shut. It's rather confusing if
you don't; but there's no danger."

The children took the locks of hair, but no one regarded them with any
confidence at all as life-saving apparatus. They still hung back.

"You really are silly," said the sea-lady indulgently. "Why did you
meddle with magic at all if you weren't prepared to go through with
it? Why, this is one of the simplest forms of magic, and the safest.
Whatever would you have done if you had happened to call up a fire
spirit and had had to go down Vesuvius with a Salamander round your
little necks?"

She laughed merrily at the thought. But her laugh sounded a little
angry too.

"Come, don't be foolish," she said. "You'll never have such a chance
again. And I feel that this air is full of your horrid human
microbes---distrust, suspicion, fear, anger, resentment--horrid little
germs. I don't want to risk catching them. Come."

"No," said Francis, and held out to her the lock of her hair; so did
Mavis and Bernard. But Kathleen had tied the lock of hair round her
neck, and she said:

"I should have liked to, but I promised Bernard I would not do
anything unless he said I might." It was towards Kathleen that the
Mermaid turned, holding out a white hand for the lock.

Kathleen bent over the water trying to untie it, and in one awful
instant the Mermaid had reared herself up in the water, caught
Kathleen in her long white arms, pulled her over the edge of the pool,
and with a bubbling splash disappeared with her beneath the dark
water.

Mavis screamed, and knew it; Francis and Bernard thought they did not
scream. It was the Spangled Child alone who said nothing. He had not
offered to give back the lock of soft hair. He, like Kathleen, had
knotted it round his neck; he now tied a further knot, stepped
forward, and spoke in tones which the other three thought the most
noble they had ever heard.

"She give me the plum pie," he said, and leapt into the water.

He sank at once. And this, curiously enough, gave the others
confidence. If he had struggled---but no---he sank like a stone, or
like a diver who means diving and diving to the very bottom.

"She's my special sister," said Bernard, and leapt.

"If it's magic it's all right---and if it isn't we couldn't go back
home without her," said Mavis hoarsely. And she and Francis took hands
and jumped together.

It was not so difficult as it sounds. From the moment of Kathleen's
disappearance the sense of magic---which is rather like very sleepy
comfort and sweet scent and sweet music that you just can't hear the
tune of---had been growing stronger and stronger. And there are some
things so horrible that if you can bring yourself to face them you
simply can't believe that they're true. It did not seem possible---
when they came quite close to the idea---that a Mermaid could really
come and talk so kindly and then drown the five children who had
rescued her.

"It's all right," Francis cried as they jumped. "I..." He shut his
mouth just in time, and down they went.

You have probably dreamed that you were a perfect swimmer? You know
the delight of that dream---swimming, which is no effort at all, and
yet carries you as far and as fast as you choose. It was like that
with the children. The moment they touched the water they felt that
they belonged in it---that they were as much at home in water as in
air. As they sank beneath the water their feet went up and their heads
went down, and there they were swimming downwards with long, steady,
easy strokes. It was like swimming down a well that presently widened
to a cavern. Suddenly Francis found that his head was above water. So
was Mavis's.

"All right so far," she said, "but how are we going to get back?"

"Oh, the magic will do that," he answered, and swam faster.

The cave was lighted by bars of phosphorescence placed like pillars
against the walls. The water was clear and deeply green and along the
sides of the stream were sea-anemones and starfish of the most
beautiful forms and the most dazzling colours. The walls were of dark
squarish shapes, and here and there a white oblong, or a blue and a
red, and the roof was of mother-of-pearl which gleamed and glistened
in the pale golden radiance of the phosphorescent pillars. It was very
beautiful, and the mere pleasure of swimming so finely and easily
swept away almost their last fear. This, too, went when a voice far
ahead called: "Hurry up, France--Come on, Mavis,"--and the voice was
the voice of Kathleen.

They hurried up, and they came on; and the gleaming soft light grew
brighter and brighter. It shone all along the way they had to go,
making a path of glory such as the moon makes across the sea on a
summer night. And presently they saw that this growing light was from
a great gate that barred the water-way in front of them. Five steps
led up to this gate, and sitting on it, waiting for them, were
Kathleen, Reuben, Bernard and the Mermaid. Only now she had no tail.
It lay beside her on the marble steps, just as your stockings lie when
you have taken them off; and there were her white feet sticking out
from under a dress of soft feathery red seaweed.

They could see it was seaweed though it was woven into a wonderful
fabric. Bernard and Kathleen and the Spangled Boy had somehow got
seaweed dresses too, and the Spangled Boy was no longer dressed as a
girl; and looking down as they scrambled up the steps Mavis and
Francis saw that they, too, wore seaweed suits--"Very pretty, but how
awkward to go home in," Mavis thought.

"Now," said the Mer-lady, "forgive me for taking the plunge. I knew
you'd hesitate for ever, and I was beginning to feel so cross! That's
your dreadful atmosphere! Now, here we are at the door of our kingdom.
You do want to come in, don't you? I can bring you as far as this
against your will, but not any further. And you can't come any further
unless you trust me absolutely. Do you? Will you? Try!"

"Yes," said the children, all but Bernard, who said stoutly:

"I don't; but I'll try to. I want to."

"If you want to, I think you do," said she very kindly. "And now I
will tell you one thing. What you're breathing isn't air, and it isn't
water. It's something that both water people and air people can
breathe."

"The greatest common measure," said Bernard.

"A simple equation," said Mavis.

"Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other,"
said Francis; and the three looked at each other and wondered why they
had said such things.

"Don't worry," said the lady, "it's only the influence of the place.
This is the Cave of Learning, you know, very dark at the beginning and
getting lighter and lighter as you get nearer to the golden door. All
these rocks are made of books really, and they exude learning from
every crack. We cover them up with anemones and seaweed and pretty
things as well as we can, but the learning will leak out. Let us go
through the gate or you'll all be talking Sanskrit before we know
where we are."

She opened the gate. A great flood of glorious sunlight met them, the
solace of green trees and the jewelled grace of bright blossoms. She
pulled them through the door and shut it.

"This is where we live," she said. "Aren't you glad you came?"



CHAPTER VII. THE SKIES ARE FALLING

AS the children passed through the golden doors a sort of swollen
feeling which was beginning to make their heads quite uncomfortable
passed away, and left them with a curiously clear and comfortable
certainty that they were much cleverer than usual.

"I could do sums now, and no mistake," Bernard whispered to Kathleen,
who replied to the effect that dates no longer presented the slightest
difficulty to her.

Mavis and Francis felt as though they had never before known what it
was to have a clear brain. They followed the