Title: The Magic World
Author: Edith Nesbit
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0602541.txt
Edition: 1
Language: English
Character set encoding: Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted: July 2006
Date most recently updated: July 2006

This eBook was produced by: Richard Scott

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html


To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au


The Magic World
Edith Nesbit



I. THE CAT-HOOD OF MAURICE

TO have your hair cut is not painful, nor does it hurt to have your
whiskers trimmed. But round wooden shoes, shaped like bowls, are not
comfortable wear, however much it may amuse the onlooker to see you
try to walk in them. If you have a nice fur coat like a company
promoter's, it is most annoying to be made to swim in it. And if you
had a tail, surely it would be solely your own affair; that any one
should tie a tin can to it would strike you as an unwarrantable
impertinence-to say the least.

Yet it is difficult for an outsider to see these things from the point
of view of both the persons concerned. To Maurice, scissors in hand,
alive and earnest to snip, it seemed the most natural thing in the
world to shorten the stiff whiskers of Lord Hugh Cecil by a generous
inch. He did not understand how useful those whiskers were to Lord
Hugh, both in sport and in the more serious business of getting a
living.

Also it amused Maurice to throw Lord Hugh into ponds, though Lord Hugh
only once permitted this liberty. To put walnuts on Lord Hugh's feet
and then to watch him walk on ice was, in Maurice's opinion, as good
as a play. Lord Hugh was a very favourite cat, but Maurice was
discreet, and Lord Hugh, except under violent suffering, was at that
time anyhow, dumb.

But the empty sardine-tin attached to Lord Hugh's tail and hind legs--
this had a voice, and, rattling against stairs, banisters, and the
legs of stricken furniture, it cried aloud for vengeance. Lord Hugh,
suffering violently, added his voice, and this time the family heard.
There was a chase, a chorus of 'Poor pussy!' and 'Pussy, then!' and
the tail and the tin and Lord Hugh were caught under Jane's bed. The
tail and the tin acquiesced in their rescue. Lord Hugh did not. He
fought, scratched, and bit. Jane carried the scars of that rescue for
many a long week.

When all was calm Maurice was sought and, after some little natural
delay, found--in the boot-cupboard.

'Oh, Maurice!' his mother almost sobbed, 'how can you? What will your
father say?'

Maurice thought he knew what his father would do.

'Don't you know,' the mother went on, 'how wrong it is to be cruel?'

'I didn't mean to be cruel,' Maurice said. And, what is more, he spoke
the truth. All the unwelcome attentions he had showered on Lord Hugh
had not been exactly intended to hurt that stout veteran--only it was
interesting to see what a cat would do if you threw it in the water,
or cut its whiskers, or tied things to its tail.

'Oh, but you must have meant to be cruel,' said mother, 'and you will
have to be punished.'

'I wish I hadn't,' said Maurice, from the heart.

'So do I,' said his mother, with a sigh; 'but it isn't the first time;
you know you tied Lord Hugh up in a bag with the hedgehog only last
Tuesday week. You'd better go to your room and think it over. I shall
have to tell your father directly he comes home.'

Maurice went to his room and thought it over. And the more he thought
the more he hated Lord Hugh. Why couldn't the beastly cat have held
his tongue and sat still? That, at the time would have been a
disappointment, but now Maurice wished it had happened. He sat on the
edge of his bed and savagely kicked the edge of the green
Kidderminster carpet, and hated the cat.

He hadn't meant to be cruel; he was sure he hadn't; he wouldn't have
pinched the cat's feet or squeezed its tail in the door, or pulled its
whiskers, or poured hot water on it. He felt himself ill-used, and
knew that he would feel still more so after the inevitable interview
with his father.

But that interview did not take the immediately painful form expected
by Maurice. His father did not say, 'Now I will show you what it feels
like to be hurt.' Maurice had braced himself for that, and was looking
beyond it to the calm of forgiveness which should follow the storm in
which he should so unwillingly take part. No; his father was already
calm and reasonable--with a dreadful calm, a terrifying reason.

'Look here, my boy,' he said. 'This cruelty to dumb animals must be
checked--severely checked.'

'I didn't mean to be cruel,' said Maurice.

'Evil,' said Mr. Basingstoke, for such was Maurice's surname, 'is
wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart. What about your
putting the hen in the oven?'

'You know,' said Maurice, pale but determined, 'you know I only wanted
to help her to get her eggs hatched quickly. It says in "Fowls for
Food and Fancy" that heat hatches eggs.'

'But she hadn't any eggs,' said Mr. Basingstoke.

'But she soon would have,' urged Maurice. 'I thought a stitch in time-
'

'That,' said his father, 'is the sort of thing that you must learn not
to think.'

'I'll try,' said Maurice, miserably hoping for the best.

'I intend that you shall,' said Mr. Basingstoke. 'This afternoon you
go to Dr. Strongitharm's for the remaining week of term. If I find any
more cruelty taking place during the holidays you will go there
permanently. You can go and get ready.'

'Oh, father, please not,' was all Maurice found to say.

'I'm sorry, my boy,' said his father, much more kindly; 'it's all for
your own good, and it's as painful to me as it is to you--remember
that. The cab will be here at four. Go and put your things together,
and Jane shall pack for you.'

So the box was packed. Mabel, Maurice's kiddy sister, cried over
everything as it was put in. It was a very wet day.

'If it had been any school but old Strong's,' she sobbed.

She and her brother knew that school well: its windows, dulled with
wire blinds, its big alarm bell, the high walls of its grounds,
bristling with spikes, the iron gates, always locked, through which
gloomy boys, imprisoned, scowled on a free world. Dr. Strongitharm's
was a school 'for backward and difficult boys.' Need I say more?

Well, there was no help for it. The box was packed, the cab was at the
door. The farewells had been said. Maurice determined that he wouldn't
cry and he didn't, which gave him the one touch of pride and joy that
such a scene could yield. Then at the last moment, just as father had
one leg in the cab, the Taxes called. Father went back into the house
to write a cheque. Mother and Mabel had retired in tears. Maurice used
the reprieve to go back after his postage-stamp album. Already he was
planning how to impress the other boys at old Strong's, and his was
really a very fair collection. He ran up into the schoolroom,
expecting to find it empty. But some one was there: Lord Hugh, in the
very middle of the ink-stained table-cloth.

'You brute,' said Maurice; 'you know jolly well I'm going away, or you
wouldn't be here.' And, indeed, the room had never, somehow, been a
favourite of Lord Hugh's.

'Meaow,' said Lord Hugh.

'Mew!' said Maurice, with scorn. 'That's what you always say. All that
fuss about a jolly little sardine-tin. Any one would have thought
you'd be only too glad to have it to play with. I wonder how you'd
like being a boy? Lickings, and lessons, and impots, and sent back
from breakfast to wash your ears. You wash yours anywhere--I wonder
what they'd say to me if I washed my ears on the drawing-room
hearthrug?'

'Meaow,' said Lord Hugh, and washed an ear, as though he were showing
off.

'Mew,' said Maurice again; 'that's all you can say.'

'Oh, no, it isn't,' said Lord Hugh, and stopped his ear-washing.

'I say!' said Maurice in awestruck tones.

'If you think cats have such a jolly time,' said Lord Hugh, 'why not
be a cat?'

'I would if I could,' said Maurice, 'and fight you-'

'Thank you,' said Lord Hugh.

'But I can't,' said Maurice.

'Oh, yes, you can,' said Lord Hugh. 'You've only got to say the word.'

'What word?'

Lord Hugh told him the word; but I will not tell you, for fear you
should say it by accident and then be sorry.

'And if I say that, I shall turn into a cat?'

'Of course,' said the cat.

'Oh, yes, I see,' said Maurice. 'But I'm not taking any, thanks. I
don't want to be a cat for always.'

'You needn't,' said Lord Hugh. 'You've only got to get some one to say
to you, Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again," and there
you are.'

Maurice thought of Dr. Strongitharm's. He also thought of the horror
of his father when he should find Maurice gone, vanished, not to be
traced. 'He'll be sorry, then,' Maurice told himself, and to the cat
he said, suddenly:-

'Right--I'll do it. What's the word, again?'

'---,' said the cat.

'---,' said Maurice; and suddenly the table shot up to the height of a
house, the walls to the height of tenement buildings, the pattern on
the carpet became enormous, and Maurice found himself on all fours. He
tried to stand up on his feet, but his shoulders were oddly heavy. He
could only rear himself upright for a moment, and then fell heavily on
his hands. He looked down at them; they seemed to have grown shorter
and fatter, and were encased in black fur gloves. He felt a desire to
walk on all fours--tried it--did it. It was very odd--the movement of
the arms straight from the shoulder, more like the movement of the
piston of an engine than anything Maurice could think of at that
moment.

'I am asleep,' said Maurice--'I am dreaming this. I am dreaming I am a
cat. I hope I dreamed that about the sardine-tin and Lord Hugh's tail,
and Dr. Strong's.'

'You didn't,' said a voice he knew and yet didn't know, 'and you
aren't dreaming this.'

'Yes, I am,' said Maurice; 'and now I'm going to dream that I fight
that beastly black cat, and give him the best licking he ever had in
his life. Come on, Lord Hugh.'

A loud laugh answered him.

'Excuse my smiling,' said the voice he knew and didn't know, 'but
don't you see--you are Lord Hugh!'

A great hand picked Maurice up from the floor and held him in the air.
He felt the position to be not only undignified but unsafe, and gave
himself a shake of mingled relief and resentment when the hand set him
down on the inky table-cloth.

'You are Lord Hugh now, my dear Maurice,' said the voice, and a huge
face came quite close to his. It was his own face, as it would have
seemed through a magnifying glass. And the voice--oh, horror!--the
voice was his own voice--Maurice Basingstoke's voice. Maurice shrank
from the voice, and he would have liked to claw the face, but he had
had no practice.

'You are Lord Hugh,' the voice repeated, 'and I am Maurice. I like
being Maurice. I am so large and strong. I could drown you in the
water-butt, my poor cat--oh, so easily. No, don't spit and swear. It's
bad manners--even in a cat.'

'Maurice!' shouted Mr. Basingstoke from between the door and the cab.

Maurice, from habit, leaped towards the door.

'It's no use your going,' said the thing that looked like a giant
reflection of Maurice; 'it's me he wants.'

'But I didn't agree to your being me.'

'That's poetry, even if it isn't grammar,' said the thing that looked
like Maurice. 'Why, my good cat, don't you see that if you are I, I
must be you? Otherwise we should interfere with time and space, upset
the balance of power, and as likely as not destroy the solar system.
Oh, yes--I'm you, right enough, and shall be, till some one tells you
to change from Lord Hugh into Maurice. And now you've got to find some
one to do it.'

('Maurice!' thundered the voice of Mr. Basingstoke.)

'That'll be easy enough,' said Maurice.

'Think so?' said the other.

'But I sha'n't try yet. I want to have some fun first. I shall catch
heaps of mice!'

'Think so? You forget that your whiskers are cut off--Maurice cut
them. Without whiskers, how can you judge of the width of the places
you go through? Take care you don't get stuck in a hole that you can't
get out of or go in through, my good cat.'

'Don't call me a cat,' said Maurice, and felt that his tail was
growing thick and angry.

'You are a cat, you know--and that little bit of temper that I see in
your tail reminds me--

Maurice felt himself gripped round the middle, abruptly lifted, and
carried swiftly through the air. The quickness of the movement made
him giddy. The light went so quickly past him that it might as well
have been darkness. He saw nothing, felt nothing, except a sort of
long sea-sickness, and then suddenly he was not being moved. He could
see now. He could feel. He was being held tight in a sort of vice--a
vice covered with chequered cloth. It looked like the pattern, very
much exaggerated, of his school knickerbockers. It was. He was being
held between the hard, relentless knees of that creature that had once
been Lord Hugh, and to whose tail he had tied a sardine-tin. Now he
was Lord Hugh, and something was being tied to his tail. Something
mysterious, terrible. Very well, he would show that he was not afraid
of anything that could be attached to tails. The string rubbed his fur
the wrong way--it was that that annoyed him, not the string itself;
and as for what was at the end of the string, what could that matter
to any sensible cat?

Maurice was quite decided that he was--and would keep on being--a
sensible cat.

The string, however, and the uncomfortable, tight position between
those chequered knees--something or other was getting on his nerves.

'Maurice!' shouted his father below, and the be-catted Maurice bounded
between the knees of the creature than wore his clothes and his looks.

'Coming, father,' this thing called, and sped away, leaving Maurice on
the servant's bed--under which Lord Hugh had taken refuge, with his
tin-can, so short and yet so long a time ago. The stairs re-echoed to
the loud boots which Maurice had never before thought loud; he had
often, indeed, wondered that anyone could object to them. He wondered
now no longer.

He heard the front door slam. That thing had gone to Dr.
Strongitharm's. That was one comfort. Lord Hugh was a boy now; he
would know what it was to be a boy. He, Maurice, was a cat, and he
meant to taste fully all catty pleasures, from milk to mice. Meanwhile
he was without mice or milk, and, unaccustomed as he was to a tail, he
could not but feel that all was not right with his own. There was a
feeling of weight, a feeling of discomfort, of positive terror. If he
should move, what would that thing that was tied to his tail do?
Rattle, of course. Oh, but he could not bear it if that thing rattled.
Nonsense; it was only a sardine-tin. Yes, Maurice knew that. But all
the same-if it did rattle! He moved his tail the least little soft
inch. No sound. Perhaps really there wasn't anything tied to his tail.
But he couldn't be sure unless he moved. But if he moved the thing
would rattle, and if it rattled Maurice felt sure that he would expire
or go mad. A mad cat. What a dreadful thing to be! Yet he couldn't sit
on that bed for ever, waiting, waiting, waiting for the dreadful thing
to happen.

'Oh, dear,' sighed Maurice the cat. 'I never knew what people meant by
"afraid" before.'

His cat-heart was beating heavily against his furry side. His limbs
were getting cramped--he must move. He did. And instantly the awful
thing happened. The sardine-tin touched the iron of the bed-foot. It
rattled.

'Oh, I can't bear it, I can't,' cried poor Maurice, in a heartrending
meaow that echoed through the house. He leaped from the bed and tore
through the door and down the stairs, and behind him came the most
terrible thing in the world. People might call it a sardine-tin, but
he knew better. It was the soul of all the fear that ever had been or
ever could be. It rattled.

Maurice who was a cat flew down the stairs; down, down-the rattling
horror followed. Oh, horrible! Down, down! At the foot of the stairs
the horror, caught by something--a banister--a stair-rod--stopped. The
string on Maurice's tail tightened, his tail was jerked, he was
stopped. But the noise had stopped too. Maurice lay only just alive at
the foot of the stairs.

It was Mabel who untied the string and soothed his terrors with
strokings and tender love-words. Maurice was surprised to find what a
nice little girl his sister really was.

'I'll never tease you again,' he tried to say, softly--but that was
not what he said. What he said was 'Purrrr.'

'Dear pussy, nice poor pussy, then,' said Mabel, and she hid away the
sardine-tin and did not tell any one. This seemed unjust to Maurice
until he remembered that, of course, Mabel thought that he was really
Lord Hugh, and that the person who had tied the tin to his tail was
her brother Maurice. Then he was half grateful. She carried him down,
in soft, safe arms, to the kitchen, and asked cook to give him some
milk.

'Tell me to change back into Maurice,' said Maurice who was quite worn
out by his cattish experiences. But no one heard him. What they heard
was, 'Meaow-Meaow-Meeeaow!'

Then Maurice saw how he had been tricked. He could be changed back
into a boy as soon as any one said to him, 'Leave off being a cat and
be Maurice again,' but his tongue had no longer the power to ask any
one to say it.

He did not sleep well that night. For one thing he was not accustomed
to sleeping on the kitchen hearthrug, and the blackbeetles were too
many and too cordial. He was glad when cook came down and turned him
out into the garden, where the October frost still lay white on the
yellowed stalks of sunflowers and nasturtiums. He took a walk, climbed
a tree, failed to catch a bird, and felt better. He began also to feel
hungry. A delicious scent came stealing out of the back kitchen door.
Oh, joy, there were to be herrings for breakfast! Maurice hastened in
and took his place on his usual chair.

His mother said, 'Down, puss,' and gently tilted the chair so that
Maurice fell off it. Then the family had herrings. Maurice said, 'You
might give me some,' and he said it so often that his father, who, of
course, heard only mewings, said:-

'For goodness' sake put that cat out of the room.

Maurice breakfasted later, in the dust-bin, on herring heads.

But he kept himself up with a new and splendid idea. They would give
him milk presently, and then they should see.

He spent the afternoon sitting on the sofa in the dining-room,
listening to the conversation of his father and mother. It is said
that listeners never hear any good of themselves. Maurice heard so
much that he was surprised and humbled. He heard his father say that
he was a fine, plucky little chap, but he needed a severe lesson, and
Dr. Strongitharm was the man to give it to him. He heard his mother
say things that made his heart throb in his throat and the tears prick
behind those green cat-eyes of his. He had always thought his parents
a little bit unjust. Now they did him so much more than justice that
he felt quite small and mean inside his cat-skin.

'He's a dear, good, affectionate boy,' said mother. 'It's only his
high spirits. Don't you think, darling, perhaps you were a little bard
on him?'

'It was for his own good,' said father.

'Of course,' said mother; 'but I can't bear to think of him at that
dreadful school.'

'Well-,' father was beginning, when Jane came in with the tea-things
on a clattering tray, whose sound made Maurice tremble in every leg.
Father and mother began to talk about the weather.

Maurice felt very affectionately to both his parents. The natural way
of showing this was to jump on to the sideboard and thence on to his
father's shoulders. He landed there on his four padded feet, light as
a feather, but father was not pleased.

'Bother the cat! ' he cried. 'Jane, put it out of the room.'

Maurice was put out. His great idea, which was to be carried out with
milk, would certainly not be carried out in the dining-room. He sought
the kitchen, and, seeing a milk-can on the window-ledge, jumped up
beside the can and patted it as he had seen Lord Hugh do.

'My!' said a friend of Jane's who happened to be there, 'ain't that
cat clever-a perfect moral, I call her.'

'He's nothing to boast of this time,' said cook. 'I will say for Lord
Hugh he's not often taken in with a empty can.'

This was naturally mortifying for Maurice, but he pretended not to
hear, and jumped from the window to the tea-table and patted the milk
jug.

'Come,' said the cook, 'that's more like it,' and she poured him out a
full saucer and set it on the floor.

Now was the chance Maurice had longed for. Now he could carry out that
idea of his. He was very thirsty, for he had had nothing since that
delicious breakfast in the dust-bin. But not for worlds would he have
drunk the milk. No. He carefully dipped his right paw in it, for his
idea was to make letters with it on the kitchen oil-cloth. He meant to
write 'Please tell me to leave off being a cat and be Maurice again,'
but he found his paw a very clumsy pen, and he had to rub out the
first 'P' because it only looked like an accident. Then he tried again
and actually did make a 'P' that any fair-minded person could have
read quite easily.

'I wish they'd notice,' he said, and before he got the 'l' written
they did notice.

'Drat the cat,' said cook; 'look how he's messing the floor up.'

And she took away the milk.

Maurice put pride aside and mewed to have the milk put down again. But
he did not get it.

Very weary, very thirsty, and very tired of being Lord Hugh, he
presently found his way to the schoolroom, where Mabel with patient
toil was doing her home-lessons. She took him on her lap and stroked
him while she learned her French verb. He felt that he was growing
very fond of her. People were quite right to be kind to dumb animals.
Presently she had to stop stroking him and do a map. And after that
she kissed him and put him down and went away. All the time she had
been doing the map, Maurice had had but one thought: Ink.

The moment the door had closed behind her--how sensible people were
who closed doors gently--he stood up in her chair with one paw on the
map and the other on the ink. Unfortunately, the inkstand top was made
to dip pens in, and not to dip paws. But Maurice was desperate. He
deliberately upset the ink--most of it rolled over the table-cloth---
and fell pattering on the carpet, but with what was left he wrote
quite plainly, across the map:-

  'Please tell Lord Hugh
  to stop being
  a cat and be Mau
  rice again.'

'There!' he said; 'they can't make any mistake about that.' They
didn't. But they made a mistake about who had done it, and Mabel was
deprived of jam with her supper bread.

Her assurance that some naughty boy must have come through the window
and done it while she was not there convinced nobody, and, indeed, the
window was shut and bolted.

Maurice, wild with indignation, did not mend matters by seizing the
opportunity of a few minutes' solitude to write:-

  It was not Mabel
  it was Maur
  ice I mean Lord Hugh,
because when that was seen Mabel was instantly sent to bed.

'It's not fair!' cried Maurice.

'My dear,' said Maurice's father, 'if that cat goes on mewing to this
extent you'll have to get rid of it.'

Maurice said not another word. It was bad enough to be a cat, but to
be a cat that was 'got rid off'! He knew how people got rid of cats.
In a stricken silence he left the room and slunk up the stairs--he
dared not mew again, even at the door of Mabel's room. But when Jane
went in to put Mabel's light out Maurice crept in too, and in the dark
tried with stifled mews and purrs to explain to Mabel how sorry he
was. Mabel stroked him and he went to sleep, his last waking thought
amazement at the blindness that had once made him call her a silly
little kid.

If you have ever been a cat you will understand something of what
Maurice endured during the dreadful days that followed. If you have
not, I can never make you understand fully. There was the affair of
the fishmonger's tray balanced on the wall by the back door--the
delicious curled-up whiting; Maurice knew as well as you do that one
mustn't steal fish out of other people's trays, but the cat that he
was didn't know. There was an inward struggle--and Maurice was beaten
by the cat-nature. Later he was beaten by the cook.

Then there was that very painful incident with the butcher's dog, the
flight across gardens, the safety of the plum tree gained only just in
time.

And, worst of all, despair took hold of him, for he saw that nothing
he could do would make any one say those simple words that would
release him. He had hoped that Mabel might at last be made to
understand, but the ink had failed him; she did not understand his
subdued mewings, and when he got the cardboard letters and made the
same sentence with them Mabel only thought it was that naughty boy who
came through locked windows. Somehow he could not spell before any
one--his nerves were not what they had been. His brain now gave him no
new ideas. He felt that he was really growing like a cat in his mind.
His interest in his meals grew beyond even what it had been when they
were a schoolboy's meals. He hunted mice with growing enthusiasm,
though the loss of his whiskers to measure narrow places with made
hunting difficult.

He grew expert in bird-stalking, and often got quite near to a bird
before it flew away, laughing at him. But all the time, in his heart,
he was very, very miserable. And so the week went by.

Maurice in his cat shape dreaded more and more the time when Lord Hugh
in the boy shape should come backfrom Dr. Strongitharm's. He knew--who
better?--exactly the kind of things boys do to cats, and he trembled
to the end of his handsome half-Persian tail.

And then the boy came home from Dr. Strongitharm's, and at the first
sound of his boots in the hall Maurice in the cat's body fled with
silent haste to hide in the boot-cupboard.

Here, ten minutes later, the boy that had come back from Dr.
Strongitharm's found him.

Maurice fluffed up his tail and unsheathed his claws. Whatever this
boy was going to do to him Maurice meant to resist, and his resistance
should hurt the boy as much as possible. I am sorry to say Maurice
swore softly among the boots, but cat-swearing is not really wrong.

'Come out, you old duffer,' said Lord Hugh in the boy shape of
Maurice. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'

'I'll see to that,' said Maurice, backing into the corner, all teeth
and claws.

'Oh, I've had such a time!' said Lord Hugh. 'It's no use, you know,
old chap; I can see where you are by your green eyes. My word, they do
shine. I've been caned and shut up in a dark room and given thousands
of lines to write out.'

'I've been beaten, too, if you come to that,' mewed Maurice. 'Besides
the butcher's dog.'

It was an intense relief to speak to some one who could understand his
mews.

'Well, I suppose it's Pax for the future,' said Lord Hugh; 'if you
won't come out, you won't. Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice
again.'

And instantly Maurice, amid a heap of goloshes and old tennis bats,
felt with a swelling heart that he was no longer a cat. No more of
those undignified four legs, those tiresome pointed ears, so difficult
to wash, that furry coat, that contemptible tail, and that terrible
inability to express all one's feelings in two words--'mew' and
'purr'.

He scrambled out of the cupboard, and the boots and galoshes fell off
him like spray off a bather.

He stood upright in those very chequered knickerbockers that were so
terrible when their knees held one vice-like, while things were tied
to one's tail. He was face to face with another boy, exactly like
himself.

'You haven't changed, then--but there can't be two Maurices.'

'There sha'n't be; not if I know it,' said the other boy; 'a boy's
life a dog's life. Quick, before any one comes.'

'Quick what?' asked Maurice.

'Why tell me to leave off being a boy, and to be Lord Hugh Cecil
again.'

Maurice told him at once. And at once the boy was gone, and there was
Lord Hugh in his own shape, purring politely, yet with a watchful eye
on Maurice's movements.

'Oh, you needn't be afraid, old chap. It's Pax right enough,' Maurice
murmured in the ear of Lord Hugh. And Lord Hugh, arching his back
under Maurice's stroking hand, replied with a purrrr-meaow that spoke
volumes.

'Oh, Maurice, here you are. It is nice of you to be nice to Lord Hugh,
when it was because of him you--'

'He's a good old chap,' said Maurice, carelessly. 'And your not half a
bad old girl. See?'

Mabel almost wept for joy at this magnificent compliment, and Lord
Hugh himself took on a more happy and confident air.

Please dismiss any fears which you may entertain that after this
Maurice became a model boy. He didn't. But he was much nicer than
before. The conversation which he overheard when he was a cat makes
him more patient with his father and mother. And he is almost always
nice to Mabel, for he cannot forget all that she was to him when he
wore the shape of Lord Hugh. His father attributes all the improvement
in his son's character to that week at Dr. Strongitharm's--which, as
you know, Maurice never had. Lord Hugh's character is unchanged. Cats
learn slowly and with difficulty.

Only Maurice and Lord Hugh know the truth--Maurice has never told it
to any one except me, and Lord Hugh is a very reserved cat. He never
at any time had that free flow of mew which distinguished and
endangered the cathood of Maurice.



II. THE MIXED MINE

THE ship was first sighted off Dungeness. She was labouring heavily.
Her paint was peculiar and her rig outlandish. She looked like a
golden ship out of a painted picture.

'Blessed if I ever see such a rig--nor such lines neither,' old
Hawkhurst said.

It was a late afternoon, wild and grey. Slate-coloured clouds drove
across the sky like flocks of hurried camels. The waves were purple
and blue, and in the west a streak of unnatural-looking green light
was all that stood for the splendours of sunset.

'She do be a rum 'un,' said young Benenden, who had strolled along the
beach with the glasses the gentleman gave him for saving the little
boy from drowning. 'Don't know as I ever see another just like her.'

'I'd give half a dollar to any chap as can tell me where she hails
from--and what port it is where they has ships o' that cut,' said
middle-aged Haversham to the group that had now gathered.

'George!' exclaimed young Benenden from under his field-glasses,
'she's going.' And she went. Her bow went down suddenly and she stood
stern up in the water-like a duck after rain. Then quite slowly, with
no unseemly hurry, but with no moment's change of what seemed to be
her fixed purpose, the ship sank and the grey rolling waves wiped out
the place where she had been.

Now I hope you will not expect me to tell you anything more about this
ship-because there is nothing more to tell. What country she came
from, what port she was bound for, what cargo she carried, and what
kind of tongue her crew spoke-all these things are dead secrets. And a
dead secret is a secret that nobody knows. No other secrets are dead
secrets. Even I do not know this one, or I would tell you at once. For
I, at least, have no secrets from you.

When ships go down off Dungeness, things from them have a way of being
washed up on the sands of that bay which curves from Dungeness to
Folkestone, where the sea has bitten a piece out of the land just such
a half-moon-shaped piece as you bite out of a slice of bread-and-
butter. Bits of wood tangled with ropes--broken furniture--ships'
biscuits in barrels and kegs that have held brandy--seamen's chests--
and sometimes sadder things that we will not talk about just now.

Now, if you live by the sea and are grownup you know that if you find
anything on the seashore (I don't mean starfish or razor-shells or
jellyfish and sea-mice, but anything out of a ship that you would
really like to keep) your duty is to take it up to the coast-guard and
say, 'Please, I've found this.' Then the coastguard will send it to
the proper authority, and one of these days you'll get a reward of
one-third of the value of whatever it was that you picked up. But two-
thirds of the value of anything, or even three-thirds of its value, is
not at all the same thing as the thing itself--if it happened to be
the kind of thing you want. But if you are not grown-up and do not
live by the sea, but in a nice little villa in a nice little suburb,
where all the furniture is new and the servants wear white aprons and
white caps with long strings in the afternoon, then you won't know
anything about your duty, and if you find anything by the sea you'll
think that findings are keepings.

Edward was not grown-up--and he kept everything he found, including
sea-mice, till the landlady of the lodgings where his aunt was threw
his collection into the pig-pail.

Being a quiet and persevering little boy he did not cry or complain,
but having meekly followed his treasures to their long home--the pig
was six feet from nose to tail, and ate the dead sea-mouse as easily
and happily as your father eats an oyster--he started out to make a
new collection.

And the first thing he found was an oyster-shell that was pink and
green and blue inside, and the second was an old boot--very old
indeed--and the third was it.

It was a square case of old leather embossed with odd little figures
of men and animals and words that Edward could not read. It was oblong
and had no key, but a sort of leather hasp, and was curiously knotted
with string--rather like a boot-lace. And Edward opened it. There were
several things inside: queer-looking instruments, some rather like
those in the little box of mathematical instruments that he had had as
a prize at school, and some like nothing he had ever seen before. And
in a deep groove of the russet soaked velvet lining lay a neat little
brass telescope.

T-squares and set-squares and so forth are of little use on a sandy
shore. But you can always look through a telescope.

Edward picked it out and put it to his eye, and tried to see through
it a little tug that was sturdily puffing up Channel. He failed to
find the tug, and found himself gazing at a little cloud on the
horizon. As he looked it grew larger and darker, and presently a spot
of rain fell on his nose. He rubbed it off-on his jersey sleeve, I am
sorry to say, and not on his handkerchief. Then he looked through the
glass again; but he found he needed both hands to keep it steady, so
he set down the box with the other instruments on the sand at his feet
and put the glass to his eye again.

He never saw the box again. For in his unpractised efforts to cover
the tug with his glass he found himself looking at the shore instead
of at the sea, and the shore looked so odd that he could not make up
his mind to stop looking at it.

He had thought it was a sandy shore, but almost at once he saw that it
was not sand but fine shingle, and the discovery of this mistake
surprised him so much that he kept on looking at the shingle through
the little telescope, which showed it quite plainly. And as he looked
the shingle grew coarser; it was stones now-quite decent-sized stones,
large stones, enormous stones.

Something hard pressed against his foot, and he lowered the glass.

He was surrounded by big stones, and they all seemed to be moving;
some were tumbling off others that lay in heaps below them, and others
were rolling away from the beach in every direction. And the place
where he had put down the box was covered with great stones which he
could not move.

Edward was very much upset. He had never been accustomed to great
stones that moved about when no one was touching them, and he looked
round for some one to ask how it had happened.

The only person in sight was another boy in a blue jersey with red
letters on its chest.

'Hi!' said Edward, and the boy also said 'Hi!'

'Come along here,' said Edward, 'and I'll show you something.'

'Right-o!' the boy remarked, and came.

The boy was staying at the camp where the white tents were below the
Grand Redoubt. His home was quite unlike Edward's, though he also
lived with his aunt. The boy's home was very dirty and very small, and
nothing in it was ever in its right place. There was no furniture to
speak of. The servants did not wear white caps with long streamers,
because there were no servants. His uncle was a dock-labourer and his
aunt went out washing. But he had felt just the same pleasure in being
shown things that Edward or you or I might have felt, and he went
climbing over the big stones to where Edward stood waiting for him in
a sort of pit among the stones with the little telescope in his hand.

'I say,' said Edward, 'did you see any one move these stones?'

'I ain't only just come up on to the sea-wall,' said the boy, who was
called Gustus.

'They all came round me,' said Edward, rather pale. 'I didn't see any
one shoving them.'

'Who're you a-kiddin' of?' the boy inquired.

'But I did,' said Edward, 'honour bright I did. I was just taking a
squint through this little telescope I've found--and they came rolling
up to me.'

'Let's see what you found,' said Gustus, and Edward gave him the
glass. He directed it with inexpert fingers to the sea-wall, so little
trodden that on it the grass grows, and the sea-pinks, and even
convolvulus and mock-strawberry.

'Oh, look!' cried Edward, very loud. Look at the grass!'

Gustus let the glass fall to long arm's length and said 'Krikey!'

The grass and flowers on the sea-wall had grown a foot and a half-
quite tropical they looked.

'Well?' said Edward.

'What's the matter wiv everyfink?' said Gustus. 'We must both be a bit
balmy, seems ter me.'

'What's balmy?' asked Edward.

'Off your chump--looney-like what you and me is,' said Gustus. 'First
I sees things, then I sees you.'

'It was only fancy, I expect,' said Edward. 'I expect the grass on the
sea-wall was always like that, really.'

'Let's have a look through your spy-glass at that little barge,' said
Gustus, still holding the glass. 'Come on outer these 'ere paving-
stones.'

'There was a box,' said Edward, 'a box I found with lots of jolly
things in it. I laid it down somewhere-and--'

'Ain't that it over there?' Gustus asked, and levelled the glass at a
dark object a hundred yards away. 'No; it's only an old boot. I say,
this is a fine spy-glass. It does make things come big.'

'That's not it. I'm certain I put it down somewhere just here. Oh,
don't!'

He snatched the glass from Gustus.

'Look!' he said, 'look!' and pointed.

A hundred yards away stood a boot about as big as the bath you see
Marat in at Madame Tussaud's.

'S'welp me,' said Gustus, 'we're asleep, both of us, and a-dreaming as
things grow while we look at them.'

'But we're not dreaming,' Edward objected. 'You let me pinch you and
you'll see.'

'No fun in that,' said Gustus. 'Tell you what--it's the spy-glass---
that's what it is. Ever see any conjuring? I see a chap at the Mile
End Empire what made things turn into things like winking. It's the
spy-glass, that's what it is.'

'It can't be,' said the little boy who lived in a villa

'But it is,' said the little boy who lived in a slum. 'Teacher says
there ain't no bounds to the wonders of science. Blest if this ain't
one of 'em.'

'Let me look,' said Edward.

'All right; only you mark me. Whatever you sets eyes on'll grow and
grow--like the flower-tree the conjurer had under the wipe. Don't you
look at me, that's all. Hold on; I'll put something up for you to look
at--a mark like--something as doesn't matter.'

He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a boot-lace.

'I hold this up,' he said, 'and you look.'

Next moment he had dropped the boot-lace, which, swollen as it was
with the magic of the glass, lay like a snake on the stone at his
feet.

So the glass was a magic glass, as, of course, you know already.

'MY!' said Gustus, 'wouldn't I like to look at my victuals through
that there!

Thus we find Edward, of the villa--and through him Gustus, of the
slum--in possession of a unique instrument of magic. What could they
do with it?

This was the question which they talked over every time they met, and
they met continually. Edward's aunt, who at home watched him as cats
watch mice, rashly believed that at the seaside there was no mischief
for a boy to get into. And the gentleman who commanded the tented camp
believed in the ennobling effects of liberty.

After the boot, neither had dared to look at anything through the
telescope, and so they looked at it, and polished it on their sleeves
till it shone again.

Both were agreed that it would be a fine thing to get some money and
look at it, so that it would grow big. But Gustus never had any
pocket-money, and Edward had had his confiscated to pay for a window
he had not intended to break.

Gustus felt certain that some one would find out about the spy-glass
and take it away from them. His experience was that anything you
happened to like was always taken away. Edward knew that his aunt
would want to take the telescope away to 'take care of' for him. This
had already happened with the carved chessmen that his father had sent
him from India.

'I been thinking,' said Gustus, on the third day. 'When I'm a man I'm
a-going to be a burglar. You has to use your headpiece in that trade,
I tell you. So I don't think thinking's swipes, like some blokes do.
And I think p'r'aps it don't turn everything big. An' if we could find
out what it don't turn big we could see what we wanted to turn big or
what it didn't turn big, and then it wouldn't turn anything big except
what we wanted it to. See?'

Edward did not see; and I don't suppose you do, either.

So Gustus went on to explain that teacher had told him there were some
substances impervious to light, and some to cold, and so on and so
forth, and that what they wanted was a substance that should be
impervious to the magic effects of the spy-glass.

'So if we get a tanner and set it on a plate and squint at it it'll
get bigger-but so'll the plate. And we don't want to litter the place
up with plates the bigness of cartwheels. But if the plate didn't get
big we could look at the tanner till it covered the plate, and then go
on looking and looking and looking and see nothing but the tanner till
it was as big as a circus. See?'

This time Edward did see. But they got no further, because it was time
to go to the circus. There was a circus at Dymchurch just then, and
that was what made Gustus think of the sixpence growing to that size.

It was a very nice circus, and all the boys from the camp went to it--
also Edward, who managed to scramble over and wriggle under benches
till he was sitting near his friend.

It was the size of the elephant that did it. Edward had not seen an
elephant before, and when he saw it, instead of saying, 'What a size
he is!' as everybody else did, he said to himself, 'What a size I
could make him!' and pulled out the spy-glass, and by a miracle of
good luck or bad got it levelled at the elephant as it went by. He
turned the glass slowly--as it went out--and the elephant only just
got out in time. Another moment and it would have been too big to get
through the door. The audience cheered madly. They thought it was a
clever trick; and so it would have been, very clever.

'You silly cuckoo,' said Gustus, bitterly, 'now you've turned that
great thing loose on the country, and how's his keeper to manage him?'

'I could make the keeper big, too.'

'Then if I was you I should just bunk out and do it.'

Edward obeyed, slipped under the canvas of the circus tent, and found
himself on the yellow, trampled grass of the field among guy-ropes,
orange-peel, banana-skins, and dirty paper. Far above him and every
one else towered the elephant--it was now as big as the church.

Edward pointed the glass at the man who was patting the elephant's
foot--that was as far up as he could reach--and telling it to 'Come
down with you!' He was very much frightened. He did not know whether
you could be put in prison for making an elephant's keeper about forty
times his proper size. But he felt that something must be done to
control the gigantic mountain of blacklead-coloured living flesh. So
he looked at the keeper through the spy-glass, and the keeper remained
his normal size!

In the shock of this failure he dropped the spy-glass, picked it up,
and tried once more to fix the keeper. Instead he only got a circle of
black--lead--coloured elephant; and while he was trying to find the
keeper, and finding nothing but more and more of the elephant, a shout
startled him and he dropped the glass once more. He was a very clumsy
little boy, was Edward.

'Well,' said one of the men, 'what a turn it give me! I thought
Jumbo'd grown as big as a railway station, s'welp me if I didn't.'

'Now that's rum,' said another, 'so did I.'

'And he ain't,' said a third; 'seems to me he's a bit below his usual
figure. Got a bit thin or somethink, ain't he?'

Edward slipped back into the tent unobserved.

'It's all right,' he whispered to his friend, 'he's gone back to his
proper size, and the man didn't change at all.'

'Ho!' Gustus said slowly--'Ho! All right. Conjuring's a rum thing. You
don't never know where you are!'

'Don't you think you might as well be a conjurer as a burglar?'
suggested Edward, who had had his friend's criminal future rather
painfully on his mind for the last hour.

'You might,' said Gustus, 'not me. My people ain't doocks to set me up
on any such a swell lay as conjuring. Now I'm going to think, I am.
You hold your jaw and look at the 'andsome Dona a-Join' of 'er
griceful barebacked hact.'

That evening after tea Edward went, as he had been told to do, to the
place on the shore where the big stones had taught him the magic of
the spy-glass.

Gustus was already at the tryst.

'See here,' he said, 'I'm a-goin' to do something brave and fearless,
I am, like Lord Nelson and the boy on the fire-ship. You out with that
spy--glass, an' I'll let you look at me. Then we'll know where we
are.'

'But s'pose you turn into a giant?'

'Don't care. 'Sides, I sha'n't. T'other bloke didn't.'

'P'r'aps,' said Edward, cautiously, 'it only works by the seashore.'

'Ah,' said Gustus, reproachfully, 'you've been a-trying to think,
that's what you've been a-doing. What about the elephant, my emernent
scientister? Now, then!'

Very much afraid, Edward pulled out the glass and looked.

And nothing happened.

'That's number one,' said Gustus, 'now, number two.'

He snatched the telescope from Edward's hand, and turned it round and
looked through the other end at the great stones. Edward, standing by,
saw them get smaller and smaller--turn to pebbles, to beach, to sand.
When Gustus turned the glass to the giant grass and flowers on the
sea-wall, they also drew back into themselves, got smaller and
smaller, and presently were as they had been before ever Edward picked
up the magic spy-glass.

'Now we know all about it-I don't think,' said Gustus. 'To-morrow
we'll have a look at that there model engine of yours that you say
works.'

They did. They had a look at it through the spy-glass, and it became a
quite efficient motor; of rather an odd pattern it is true, and very
bumpy, but capable of quite a decent speed. They went up to the hills
in it, and so odd was its design that no one who saw it ever forgot
it. People talk about that rummy motor at Bonnington and Aldington to
this day. They stopped often, to use the spy-glass on various objects.
Trees, for instance, could be made to grow surprisingly, and there
were patches of giant wheat found that year near Ashford that were
never satisfactorily accounted for. Black-berries, too, could be
enlarged to a most wonderful and delicious fruit. And the sudden
growth of a fugitive toffee-drop found in Edward's pocket and placed
on the hand was a happy surprise. When you scraped the pocket dirt off
the outside you had a pound of delicious toffee. Not so happy was the
incident of the earwig, which crawled into view when Edward was
enlarging a wild strawberry, and had grown the size of a rat before
the slow but horrified Edward gained courage to shake it off.

It was a beautiful drive. As they came home they met a woman driving a
weak-looking little cow. It went by on one side of the engine and the
woman went by on the other. When they were restored to each other the
cow was nearly the size of a cart-horse, and the woman did not
recognise it. She ran back along the road after her cow, which must,
she said, have taken fright at the beastly motor. She scolded
violently as she went. So the boys had to make the cow small again,
when she wasn't looking.

'This is all very well,' said Gustus, 'but we've got our fortune to
make, I don't think. We've got to get hold of a tanner--or a bob would
be better.'

But this was not possible, because that broken window wasn't paid for,
and Gustus never had any money.

'We ought to be the benefactors of the human race,' said Edward; 'make
all the good things more and all the bad things less.'

And that was all very well--but the cow hadn't been a great success,
as Gustus reminded him.

'I see I shall have to do some of my thinking,' he added.

They stopped in a quiet road close by Dymchurch; the engine was made
small again, and Edward went home with it under his arm.

It was the next day that they found the shilling on the road. They
could hardly believe their good luck. They went out on to the shore
with it, put it on Edward's hand while Gustus looked at it with the
glass, and the shilling began to grow.

'It's as big as a saucer,' said Edward, 'and it's heavy. I'll rest it
on these stones. It's as big as a plate; it's as big as a tea-tray;
it's as big as a cart-wheel.'

And it was.

'Now,' said Gustus, 'we'll go and borrow a cart to take it away. Come
on.'

But Edward could not come on. His hand was in the hollow between the
two stones, and above lay tons of silver. He could not move, and the
stones couldn't move. There was nothing for it but to look at the
great round lump of silver through the wrong end of the spy-glass till
it got small enough for Edward to lift it. And then, unfortunately,
Gustus looked a little too long, and the shilling, having gone back to
its own size, went a little further--and it went to sixpenny size, and
then went out altogether.

So nobody got anything by that.

And now came the time when, as was to be expected, Edward dropped the
telescope in his aunt's presence. She said, 'What's that?', picked it
up with quite unfair quickness, and looked through it, and through the
open window at a fishing-boat, which instantly swelled to the size of
a man-of-war.

'My goodness! what a strong glass!' said the aunt.

'Isn't it?' said Edward, gently taking it from her. He looked at the
ship through the glass's other end till she got to her proper size
again and then smaller. He just stopped in time to prevent its
disappearing altogether.

'I'll take care of it for you,' said the aunt. And for the first time
in their lives Edward said 'No' to his aunt.

It was a terrible moment.

Edward, quite frenzied by his own courage, turned the glass on one
object after another--the furniture grew as he looked, and when he
lowered the glass the aunt was pinned fast between a monster table-leg
and a great chiffonier.

'There! 'said Edward 'And I shan't let you out till you say you won't
take it to take care of either.'

'Oh, have it your own way,' said the aunt, faintly, and closed her
eyes. When she opened them the furniture was its right size and Edward
was gone. He had twinges of conscience, but the aunt never mentioned
the subject again. I have reason to suppose that she supposed that she
had had a fit of an unusual and alarming nature.

Next day the boys in the camp were to go back to their slums. Edward
and Gustus parted on the seashore and Edward cried. He had never met a
boy whom he liked as he liked Gustus. And Gustus himself was almost
melted.

'I will say for you you're more like a man and less like a sniveling
white rabbit now than what you was when I met you. Well, we ain't done
nothing to speak of with that there conjuring trick of yours, but
we've 'ad a right good time. So long. See you 'gain some day.'

Edward hesitated, spluttered, and still weeping flung his arms round
Gustus.

'Ere, none o' that,' said Gustus, sternly. 'If you ain't man enough to
know better, I am. Shake 'ands like a Briton; right about face--and
part game.'

He suited the action to the word.

Edward went back to his aunt sniveling, defenceless but happy. He had
never had a friend except Gustus, and now he had given Gustus the
greatest treasure that he possessed.

For Edward was not such a white rabbit as he seemed. And in that last
embrace he had managed to slip the little telescope into the pocket of
the reefer coat which Gustus wore, ready for his journey.

It was the greatest treasure that Edward had, but it was also the
greatest responsibility, so that while he felt the joy of self-
sacrifice he also felt the rapture of relief. Life is full of such
mixed moments.

And the holidays ended and Edward went back to his villa. Be sure he
had given Gustus his home address, and begged him to write, but Gustus
never did.

Presently Edward's father came home from India, and they left his aunt
to her villa and went to live at a jolly little house on a sloping
hill at Chiselhurst, which was Edward's father's very own. They were
not rich, and Edward could not go to a very good school, and though
there was enough to eat and wear, what there was was very plain. And
Edward's father had been wounded, and somehow had not got a pension.

Now one night in the next summer Edward woke up in his bed with the
feeling that there was some one in the room. And there was. A dark
figure was squeezing itself through the window. Edward was far too
frightened to scream. He simply lay and listened to his heart. It was
like listening to a cheap American clock. The next moment a lantern
flashed in his eyes and a masked face bent over him.

'Where does your father keep his money?' said a muffled voice.

'In the b-b-b-b-bank,' replied the wretched Edward, truthfully.

'I mean what he's got in the house.'

'In his trousers pocket,' said Edward, 'only he puts it in the
dressing-table drawer at night.'

'You must go and get it,' said the burglar, for such he plainly was.

'Must I?' said Edward, wondering how he could get out of betraying his
father's confidence and being branded as a criminal.

'Yes,' said the burglar in an awful voice, 'get up and go.'

'No,' said Edward, and he was as much surprised at his courage as you
are.

'Bravo!' said the burglar, flinging off his mask. 'I see you aren't
such a white rabbit as what I thought you.'

'It's Gustus,' said Edward. 'Oh, Gustus, I'm so glad! Oh, Gustus, I'm
so sorry! I always hoped you wouldn't be a burglar. And now you are.'

'I am so,' said Gustus, with pride, 'but,' he added sadly, 'this is my
first burglary.'

'Couldn't it be the last?' suggested Edward.

'That,' replied Gustus, 'depends on you.'

'I'll do anything,' said Edward, 'anything.'

'You see,' said Gustus, sitting down on the edge of the bed in a
confidential attitude, with the dark lantern in one hand and the mask
in the other, 'when you're as hard up as we are, there's not much of a
living to be made honest. I'm sure I wonder we don't all of us turn
burglars, so I do. And that glass of yours--you little beggar--you did
me proper--sticking of that thing in my pocket like what you did.
Well, it kept us alive last winter, that's a cert. I used to look at
the victuals with it, like what I said I would. A farden's worth o'
pease-pudden was a dinner for three when that glass was about, and a
penn'orth o' scraps turned into a big beef-steak almost. They used to
wonder how I got so much for the money. But I'm always afraid o' being
found out--or of losing the blessed spy-glass--or of some one pinching
it. So we got to do what I always said-make some use of it. And if I
go along and nick your father's dibs we'll make our fortunes right
away.'

'No,' said Edward, 'but I'll ask father.'

'Rot.' Gustus was crisp and contemptuous. 'He'd think you was off your
chump, and he'd get me lagged.'

'It would be stealing,' said Edward.

'Not when you'll pay it back.'

'Yes, it would,' said Edward. 'Oh, don't ask me-I can't.'

'Then I shall,' said Gustus. 'Where's his room.'

'Oh, don't!' said Edward. 'I've got a half-sovereign of my own. I'll
give you that.'

'Lawk!' said Gustus. 'Why the blue monkeys couldn't you say so? Come
on.'

He pulled Edward out of bed by the leg, hurried his clothes on anyhow,
and half-dragged, half-coaxed him through the window and down by the
ivy and the chicken-house roof.

They stood face to face in the sloping garden and Edward's teeth
chattered. Gustus caught him by his hand, and led him away.

At the other end of the shrubbery, where the rockery was, Gustus
stooped and dragged out a big clinker--then another, and another.
There was a hole like a big rabbit-hole. If Edward had really been a
white rabbit it would just have fitted him.

'I'll go first,' said Gustus, and went, headforemost. 'Come on,' he
said, hollowly, from inside. And Edward, too, went. It was dreadful
crawling into that damp hole in the dark. As his head got through the
hole he saw that it led to a cave, and below him stood a dark figure.
The lantern was on the ground.

'Come on,' said Gustus, 'I'll catch you if you fall.'

With a rush and a scramble Edward got in.

'It's caves,' said Gustus. 'A chap I know that goes about the country
bottoming cane-chairs, 'e told me about it. And I nosed about and
found he lived here. So then I thought what a go. So now we'll put
your half-shiner down and look at it, and we'll have a gold-mine, and
you can pretend to find it.'

'Halves!' said Edward, briefly and firmly.

'You're a man,' said Gustus. 'Now, then!' He led the way through a
maze of chalk caves till they came to a convenient spot, which he had
marked. And now Edward emptied his pockets on the sand--he had brought
all the contents of his money-box, and there was more silver than
gold, and more copper than either, and more odd rubbish than there was
anything else. You know what a boy's pockets are like. Stones and
putty, and slate-pencils and marbles--I urge in excuse that Edward was
a very little boy--a bit of plasticine, one or two bits of wood.

'No time to sort 'em,' said Gustus, and, putting the lantern in a
suitable position, he got out the glass and began to look through it
at the tumbled heap.

And the heap began to grow. It grew out sideways till it touched the
walls of the recess, and outwards till it touched the top of the
recess, and then it slowly worked out into the big cave and came
nearer and nearer to the boys. Everything grew--stones, putty, money,
wood, plasticine.

Edward patted the growing mass as though it were alive and he loved
it, and Gustus said 'Here's clothes, and beef, and bread, and tea, and
coffee--and baccy--and a good school, and me a engineer. I see it all
a-growing and a-growing.'

'Hi-stop!' said Edward suddenly.

Gustus dropped the telescope. It rolled away into the darkness.

'Now you've done it,' said Edward.

'What?' said Gustus.

'My hand,' said Edward, 'it's fast between the rock and the gold and
things. Find the glass and make it go smaller so that I can get my
hand out.'

But Gustus could not find the glass. And, what is more, no one ever
has found it to this day.

'It's no good,' said Gustus, at last. 'I'll go and find your father.
They must come and dig you out of this precious Tom Tiddler's ground.'

'And they'll lag you if they see you. You said they would,' said
Edward, not at all sure what lagging was, but sure that it was
something dreadful. 'Write a letter and put it in his letter-box.
They'll find it in the morning.'

'And leave you pinned by the hand all night? Likely--I don't think,'
said Gustus.

'I'd rather,' said Edward, bravely, but his voice was weak. 'I
couldn't bear you to be lagged, Gustus. I do love you so.'

'None of that,' said Gustus, sternly. 'I'll leave you the lamp; I can
find my way with matches. Keep up your pecker, and never say die.'

'I won't,' said Edward, bravely. 'Oh, Gustus!'

That was how it happened that Edward's father was roused from slumbers
by violent shakings from an unknown hand, while an unknown voice
uttered these surprising words:-

'Edward is in the gold and silver and copper mine that we've found
under your garden. Come and get him out.'

When Edward's father was at last persuaded that Gustus was not a silly
dream--and this took some time--he got up.

He did not believe a word that Gustus said, even when Gustus added
'S'welp me!' which he did several times.

But Edward's bed was empty--his clothes gone.

Edward's father got the gardener from next door--with, at the
suggestion of Gustus, a pick--the hole in the rockery was enlarged,
and they all got in.

And when they got to the place where Edward was, there, sure enough,
was Edward, pinned by the hand between a piece of wood and a piece of
rock. Neither the father nor the gardener noticed any metal. Edward
had fainted.

They got him out; a couple of strokes with the pick released his hand,
but it was bruised and bleeding.

They all turned to go, but they had not gone twenty yards before there
was a crash and a loud report like thunder, and a slow rumbling,
rattling noise very dreadful to hear.

Get out of this quick, sir,' said the gardener; 'the roof's fell in;
this part of the caves ain't safe.'

Edward was very feverish and ill for several days, during which he
told his father the whole story--of which his father did not believe a
word. But he was kind to Gustus, because Gustus was evidently fond of
Edward.

When Edward was well enough to walk in the garden his father and he
found that a good deal of the shrubbery had sunk, so that the trees
looked as though they were growing in a pit.

It spoiled the look of the garden, and Edward's father decided to move
the trees to the other side.

When this was done the first tree uprooted showed a dark hollow below
it. The man is not born who will not examine and explore a dark hollow
in his own grounds. So Edward's father explored.

This is the true story of the discovery of that extraordinary vein of
silver, copper, and gold which has excited so much interest in
scientific and mining circles. Learned papers have been written about
it, learned professors have been rude to each other about it, but no
one knows how it came there except Gustus and Edward and you and me.
Edward's father is quite as ignorant as any one else, but he is much
richer than most of them; and, at any rate, he knows that it was
Gustus who first told him of the gold-mine, and who risked being
lagged---arrested by the police, that is--rather than let Edward wait
till morning with his hand fast between wood and rock.

So Edward and Gustus have been to a good school, and now they are at
Winchester, and presently they will be at Oxford. And when Gustus is
twenty-one he will have half the money that came from the gold-mine.
And then he and Edward mean to start a school of their own. And the
boys who are to go to it are to be the sort of boys who go to the
summer camp of the Grand Redoubt near the sea--the kind of boy that
Gustus was.

So the spy-glass will do some good after all, though it was so
unmanageable to begin with.

Perhaps it may even be found again. But I rather hope it won't. It
might, really, have done much more mischief than it did--and if any
one found it, it might do more yet.

There is no moral to this story, except...But no--there is no
moral.



III. ACCIDENTAL MAGIC; OR DON'T TELL ALL YOU KNOW

QUENTIN DE WARD was rather a nice little boy, but he had never been
with other little boys, and that made him in some ways a little
different from other little boys. His father was in India, and he and
his mother lived in a little house in the New Forest. The house--it
was a cottage really, but even a cottage is a house, isn't it?--was
very pretty and thatched and had a porch covered with honeysuckle and
ivy and white roses, and straight red hollyhocks were trained to stand
up in a row against the south wall of it. The two lived quite alone,
and as they had no one else to talk to they talked to each other a
good deal. Mrs. de Ward read a great many books, and she used to tell
Quentin about them afterwards. They were usually books about out of
the way things, for Mrs. de Ward was interested in all the things that
people are not quite sure about--the things that are hidden and
secret, wonderful and mysterious--the things people make discoveries
about. So that when the two were having their tea on the little brick
terrace in front of the hollyhocks, with the white cloth flapping in
the breeze, and the wasps hovering round the jam-pot, it was no
uncommon thing for Quentin to say thickly through his bread and jam:--

'I say, mother, tell me some more about Atlantis.' Or, 'Mother, tell
me some more about ancient Egypt and the little toy-boats they made
for their little boys.' Or, 'Mother, tell me about the people who
think Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare.'

And his mother always told him as much as she thought he could
understand, and he always understood quite half of what she told him.

They always talked the things out thoroughly, and thus he learned to
be fond of arguing, and to enjoy using his brains, just as you enjoy
using your muscles in the football field or the gymnasium.

Also he came to know quite a lot of odd, out of the way things, and to
have opinions of his own concerning the lost Kingdom of Atlantis, and
the Man with the Iron Mask, the building of Stonehenge, the Pre-
dynastic Egyptians, cuneiform writings and Assyrian sculptures, the
Mexican pyramids and the shipping activities of Tyre and Sidon.

Quentin did no regular lessons, such as most boys have, but he read
all sorts of books and made notes from them, in a large and straggling
handwriting.

You will already have supposed that Quentin was a prig. But he wasn't,
and you would have owned this if you had seen him scampering through
the greenwood on his quiet New Forest pony, or setting snares for the
rabbits that would get into the garden and eat the precious lettuces
and parsley. Also he fished in the little streams that run through
that lovely land, and shot with a bow and arrows. And he was a very
good shot too.

Besides this he collected stamps and birds' eggs and picture post-
cards, and kept guinea-pigs and bantams, and climbed trees and tore
his clothes in twenty different ways. And once he fought the grocer's
boy and got licked and didn't cry, and made friends with the grocer's
boy afterwards, and got him to show him all he knew about fighting, so
you see he was really not a mug. He was ten years old and he had
enjoyed every moment of his ten years, even the sleeping ones, because
he always dreamed jolly dreams, though he could not always remember
what they were.

I tell you all this so that you may understand why he said what he did
when his mother broke the news to him.

He was sitting by the stream that ran along the end of the garden,
making bricks of the clay that the stream's banks were made of. He
dried them in the sun, and then baked them under the kitchen stove.
(It is quite a good way to make bricks--you might try it sometimes.)
His mother came out, looking just as usual, in her pink cotton gown
and her pink sunbonnet; and she had a letter in her hand.

'Hullo, boy of my heart,' she said, 'very busy?'

'Yes,' said Quentin importantly, not looking up, and going on with his
work. 'I'm making stones to build Stonehenge with. You'll show me how
to build it, won't you, mother.'

'Yes, dear,' she said absently. 'Yes, if I can.'

'Of course you can,' he said, 'you can do everything.'

She sat down on a tuft of grass near him.

'Quentin dear,' she said, and something in her voice made him look up
suddenly.

'Oh, mother, what is it?' he asked.

'Daddy's been wounded,' she said; 'he's all right now, dear--don't be
frightened. Only I've got to go out to him. I shall meet him in Egypt.
And you must go to school in Salisbury, a very nice school, dear, till
I come back.'

'Can't I come too?' he asked.

And when he understood that he could not he went on with the bricks in
silence, with his mouth shut very tight.

After a moment he said, 'Salisbury? Then I shall see Stonehenge?'

'Yes,' said his mother, pleased that he took the news so calmly, 'you
will be sure to see Stonehenge some time.'

He stood still, looking down at the little mould of clay in his hand--
so still that his mother got up and came close to him.

'Quentin,' she said, 'darling, what is it?'

He leaned his head against her.

'I won't make a fuss,' he said, 'but you can't begin to be brave the
very first minute. Or, if you do, you can't go on being.'

And with that he began to cry, though he had not cried after the
affair of the grocer's boy.

......

The thought of school was not so terrible to Quentin as Mrs. de Ward
had thought it would be. In fact, he rather liked it, with half his
mind; but the other half didn't like it, because it meant parting from
his mother who, so far, had been his only friend. But it was exciting
to be taken to Southampton, and have all sorts of new clothes bought
for you, and a school trunk, and a little polished box that locked up,
to keep your money in and your gold sleeve links, and your watch and
chain when you were not wearing them.

Also the journey to Salisbury was made in a motor, which was very
exciting of course, and rather took Quentin's mind off the parting
with his mother, as she meant it should. And there was a very grand
lunch at The White Hart Hotel at Salisbury, and then, very suddenly
indeed, it was good-bye, good-bye, and the motor snorted, and hooted,
and throbbed, and rushed away, and mother was gone, and Quentin was at
school.

I believe it was quite a nice school. It was in a very nice house with
a large quiet garden, and there were only about twenty boys. And the
masters were kind, and the boys no worse than other boys of their age.
But Quentin hated it from the very beginning. For when his mother had
gone the Headmaster said 'School will be out in half-an-hour; take a
book, De Ward,' and gave him Little Eric and his Friends, a mere baby
book. It was too silly. He could not read it. He saw on a shelf near
him, Smith's Antiquities, a very old friend of his, so he said: 'I'd
rather have this, please.'

'You should say "sir" when you speak to a master,' the Head said to
him. 'Take the book by all means.' To himself the Head said, 'I wish
you joy of it, you little prig.'

When school was over, one of the boys was told to show Quentin his bed
and his locker. The matron had already unpacked his box and his pile
of books was waiting for him to carry it over.

'Golly, what a lot of books,' said Smithson minor. 'What's this?
Atlantis? Is it a jolly story?'

'It isn't a story,' said Quentin. And just then the classical master
came by. 'What's that about Atlantis?' he said.

'It's a book the new chap's got,' said Smithson.

The classical master glanced at the book.

'And how much do you understand of this?' he asked, fluttering the
leaves.

'Nearly all, I think,' said Quentin.

'You should say "sir" when you speak to a master,' said the classical
one; and to himself he added, 'little prig.' Then he said to Quentin:
'I am afraid you will find yourself rather out of your element among
ordinary boys.'

'I don't think so,' said Quentin calmly, adding as an afterthought
'sir.'

'I'm glad you're so confident,' said the classical master and went.

'My word,' said Smithson minor in a rather awed voice, 'you did answer
him back.'

'Of course I did,' said Quentin. 'Don't you answer when you're spoken
to?'

Smithson minor informed the interested school that the new chap was a
prig, but he had a cool cheek, and that some sport might be expected.

After supper the boys had half an hour's recreation. Quentin, who was
tired, picked up a book which a big boy had just put down. It was the
Midsummer Night's Dream.

'Hi, you kid,' said the big boy, 'don't pretend you read Shakespeare
for fun. That's simple swank, you know.'

'I don't know what swank is,' said Quentin, 'but I like the Midsummer
whoever wrote it.'

'Whoever what?'

'Well,' said Quentin, 'there's a good deal to be said for its being
Bacon who wrote the plays.'

Of course that settled it. From that moment, he was called not De
Ward, which was strange enough, but Bacon. He rather liked that. But
the next day it was Pork, and the day after Pig, and that was
unbearable.

He was at the bottom of his class, for he knew no Latin as it is
taught in schools, only odd words that English words come from, and
some Latin words that are used in science. And I cannot pretend that
his arithmetic was anything but contemptible.

The book called Atlantis had been looked at by most of the school, and
Smithson major, not nearly such an agreeable boy as his brother, hit
on a new nickname.

'Atlantic Pork's a good name for a swanker,' he said. 'You know the
rotten meat they have in Chicago.'

This was in the playground before dinner. Quentin, who had to keep his
mouth shut very tight these days, because, of course, a boy of ten
cannot cry before other chaps, shut the book he was reading and looked
up.

'I won't be called that,' he said quietly.

'Who said you wouldn't?' said Smithson major, who, after all, was only
twelve. 'I say you will.'

'If you call me that I shall hit you,' said Quentin, 'as hard as I
can.'

A roar of laughter went up, and cries of, 'Poor old Smithson'---
'Apologise, Smithie, and leave the omnibus.'

'And what should I being doing while you were hitting me?' asked
Smithson contemptuously.

'I don't know and I don't care,' said Quentin.

Smithson looked round. No master was in sight. It seemed an excellent
opportunity to teach young De Ward his place.

'Atlantic pig-swine,' he said very deliberately. And Quentin sprang at
him, and instantly it was a fight.

Now Quentin had only once fought--really fought--before. Then it was
the grocer's boy and he had been beaten. But he had learned something
since. And the chief conclusion he now drew from his memories of that
fight was that he had not hit half hard enough, an opinion almost
universal among those who have fought and not won.

As the fist of Smithson major described a half circle and hurt his ear
very much, Quentin suddenly screwed himself up and hit out with his
right hand, straight, and with his whole weight behind the blow as the
grocer's boy had shown him. All his grief for his wounded father, his
sorrow at the parting from his mother, all his hatred of his school,
and his contempt for his schoolfellows went into that blow. It landed
on the point of the chin of Smithson major who fell together like a
heap of rags.

'Oh,' said Quentin, gazing with interest at his hand--it hurt a good
deal but he looked at it with respect--'I'm afraid I've hurt him.'

He had forgotten for a moment that he was in an enemies' country, and
so, apparently, had his enemies.

'Well done, Piggy! Bravo, young 'un Well hit, by Jove!'

Friendly hands thumped him on the back. Smithson major was no popular
hero.

Quentin felt--as his schoolfellows would have put it--bucked. It is
one thing to be called Pig in enmity and derision. Another to be
called Piggy--an affectionate diminutive, after all--to the chorus of
admiring smacks.

'Get up, Smithie,' cried the ring. 'Want any more?'

It appeared that Smithie did not want any more. He lay, not moving at
all, and very white.

'I say,' the crowd's temper veered, 'you've killed him, I expect. I
wouldn't like to be you, Bacon.'

Pig, you notice, for aggravation--Piggy in enthusiastic applause. In
the moment of possible tragedy the more formal Bacon.

'I haven't,' said Quentin, very white himself, 'but if I have he
began--by calling names.

Smithson moved and grunted. A sigh of relief swept the ring as a
breeze sweeps a cornfield.

'He's all right. A fair knock out. Piggy's got the use of 'em. Do
Smithie good.' The voices hushed suddenly. A master was on the
scene---the classical master.

'Fighting?' he said. 'The new boy? Who began it?'

'I did,' said Quentin, 'but he began with calling names.'

'Sneak!' murmured the entire school, and Quentin, who had seen no
reason for not speaking the truth, perceived that one should not tell
all one knows, and that once more he stood alone in the world.

'You will go to your room, De Ward,' said the classical master,
bending over Smithson, who having been 'knocked silly' still remained
in that condition, 'and the headmaster will consider your case to-
morrow. You will probably be expelled.'

Quentin went to his room and thought over his position. It seemed to
be desperate. How was he to know that the classical master was even
then saying to the Head:

'He's got something in him, prig or no prig, sir.'

'You were quite right to send him to his room,' said the Head,
'discipline must be maintained, as Mr. Ducket says. But it will do
Smithson major a world of good. A boy who reads Shakespeare for fun,
and has views about Atlantis, and can knock out a bully as well...
. He'll be a power in the school. But we mustn't let him know it.'

That was rather a pity. Because Quentin, furious at the injustice of
the whole thing--Smithson, the aggressor, consoled with; himself
punished; expulsion threatened--was maturing plans.

'If mother had known what it was like,' he said to himself, 'she would
never have left me here. I've got the two pounds she gave me. I shall
go to the White Hart at Salisbury... no, they'd find me then. I'll go
to Lyndhurst; and write to her. It's better to run away than to be
expelled. Quentin Durward would never have waited to be expelled from
anywhere.'

Of course Quentin Durward was my hero's hero. It could not be
otherwise since his own name was so like that of the Scottish
guardsman.

Now the school in Salisbury was a little school for little boys---boys
who were used to schools and took the rough with the smooth. But
Quentin was not used to schools, and he had taken the rough very much
to heart. So much that he did not mean to take any more of it.

His dinner was brought up on a tray--bread and water. He put the bread
in his pocket. Then when he knew that every one was at dinner in the
long dining-room at the back of the house, he just walked very quietly
down the stairs, opened the side door and marched out, down the garden
path and out at the tradesmen's gate. He knew better than to shut
either gate or door.

He went quickly down the street, turned the first corner he came to so
as to get out of sight of the school. He turned another corner, went
through an archway, and found himself in an inn-yard--very quiet
indeed. Only a liver-coloured lurcher dog wagged a sleepy tail on the
hot flag-stones.

Quentin was just turning to go back through the arch, for there was no
other way out of the yard, when he saw a big covered cart, whose horse
wore a nose-bag and looked as if there was no hurry. The cart bore the
name, 'Miles, Carrier, Lyndhurst.'

Quentin knew all about lifts. He had often begged them and got them.
Now there was no one to ask. But he felt he could very well explain
later that he had wanted a lift, much better than now, in fact, when
he might be caught at any moment by some one from the school.

He climbed up by the shaft. There were boxes and packages of all sorts
in the cart, and at the back an empty crate with sacking over it. He
got into the crate, pulled the sacking over himself, and settled down
to eat his bread.

Presently the carrier came out, and there was talk, slow, long-drawn
talk. After a long while the cart shook to the carrier's heavy climb
into it, the harness rattled, the cart lurched, and the wheels were
loud and bumpy over the cobble stones of the yard.

Quentin felt safe. The glow of anger was still hot in him, and he was
glad to think how they would look for him all over the town, in vain.
He lifted the sacking at one corner so that he could look out between
the canvas of the cart's back and side, and hoped to see the classical
master distractedly looking for him. But the streets were very sleepy.
Every one in Salisbury was having dinner--or in the case of the
affluent, lunch.

The black horse seemed as sleepy as the streets, and went very slowly.
Also it stopped very often, and wherever there were parcels to leave
there was slow, long talkings to be exchanged. I think, perhaps,
Quentin dozed a good deal under his sacks. At any rate it was with a
shock of surprise that he suddenly heard the carrier's voice saying,
as the horse stopped with a jerk.

'There's a crate for you, Mrs. Baddock, returned empty,' and knew that
that crate was not empty, but full--full of boy.

'I'll go and call Joe,' said a voice--Mrs. Baddock's, Quentin
supposed, and slow feet stumped away over stones. Mr. Miles leisurely
untied the tail of the cart, ready to let the crate be taken out.

Quentin spent a paralytic moment. What could he do?

And then, luckily or unluckily, a reckless motor tore past, and the
black horse plunged and Mr. Miles had to go to its head and 'talk
pretty' to it for a minute. And in that minute Quentin lifted the
sacking, and looked out. It was low sunset, and the street was
deserted. He stepped out of the crate, dropped to the ground, and
slipped behind a stout and friendly water-butt that seemed to offer
protective shelter.

Joe came, and the crate was taken down.

'You haven't seen nothing of that there runaway boy by chance?' said a
new voice--Joe's no doubt.

'What boy?' said Mr. Miles.

'Run away from school, Salisbury,' said Joe. 'Telegrams far and near,
so they be. Little varmint.'

'I ain't seen no boys, not more'n ordinary,' said Mr. Miles. 'Thick as
flies they be, here, there, and everywhere, drat 'em. Sixpence---
Correct. So long, Joe.'

The cart rattled away. Joe and the crate blundered out of hearing, and
Quentin looked cautiously round the water-butt.

This was an adventure. But he was cooler now than he had been at
starting--his hot anger had died down. He would have been contented,
he could not help feeling, with a less adventurous adventure.

But he was in for it now. He felt, as I suppose people feel when they
jump off cliffs with parachutes, that return was impossible.

Hastily turning his school cap inside out--the only disguise he could
think of, he emerged from the water-butt seclusion and into the
street, trying to look as if there was no reason why he should not be
there. He did not know the village. It was not Lyndhurst. And of
course asking the way was not to be thought of.

There was a piece of sacking lying on the road; it must have dropped
from the carrier's cart. He picked it up and put it over his
shoulders.

'A deeper disguise,' he said, and walked on.

He walked steadily for a long, long way as it seemed, and the world
got darker and darker. But he kept on. Surely he must presently come
to some village, or some signpost.

Anyhow, whatever happened, he could not go back. That was the one
certain thing. The broad stretches of country to right and left held
no shapes of houses, no glimmer of warm candle-light; they were bare
and bleak, only broken by circles of trees that stood out like black
islands in the misty grey of the twilight.

'I shall have to sleep behind a hedge,' he said bravely enough; but
there did not seem to be any hedges. And then, quite suddenly, he came
upon it.

A scattered building, half transparent as it seemed, showing black
against the last faint pink and primrose of the sunset. He stopped,
took a few steps off the road on short, crisp turf that rose in a
gentle slope. And at the end of a dozen paces he knew it. Stonehenge!
Stonehenge he had always wanted so desperately to see. Well, he saw it
now, more or less.

He stopped to think. He knew that Stonehenge stands all alone on
Salisbury Plain. He was very tired. His mother had told him about a
girl in a book who slept all night on the altar stone at Stonehenge.
So it was a thing that people did--to sleep there. He was not afraid,
as you or I might have been--of that lonely desolate ruin of a temple
of long ago. He was used to the forest, and, compared with the forest,
any building is homelike.

There was just enough light left amid the stones of the wonderful
broken circle to guide him to its centre. As he went his hand brushed
a plant; he caught at it, and a little group of flowers came away in
his hand.

'St. John's wort,' he said, 'that's the magic flower.' And he
remembered that it is only magic when you pluck it on Midsummer Eve.

'And this is Midsummer Eve,' he told himself, and put it in his
buttonhole.

'I don't know where the altar stone is,' he said, 'but that looks a
cosy little crack between those two big stones.'

He crept into it, and lay down on a flat stone that stretched between
and under two fallen pillars.

The night was soft and warm; it was Midsummer Eve.

'Mother isn't going till the twenty-sixth,' he told himself. 'I
sha'n't bother about hotels. I shall send her a telegram in the
morning, and get a carriage at the nearest stables and go straight
back to her. No, she won't be angry when she hears all about it. I'll
ask her to let me go to sea instead of to school. It's much more
manly. Much more manly...much much more, much.'

He was asleep. And the wild west wind that swept across the plain
spared the little corner where he lay asleep, curled up in his sacking
with the inside--out school cap, doubled twice, for pillow.

He fell asleep on the smooth, solid, steady stone.

He awoke on the stone in a world that rocked as sea-boats rock on a
choppy sea.

He went to sleep between fallen moveless pillars of a ruin older than
any world that history knows.

He awoke in the shade of a purple awning through which strong sunlight
filtered, and purple curtains that flapped and strained in the wind;
and there was a smell, a sweet familiar smell, of tarred ropes and the
sea.

'I say,' said Quentin to himself, 'here's a rum go.'

He had learned that expression in a school in Salisbury, a long time
ago as it seemed. The stone on which he lay dipped and rose to a
rhythm which he knew well enough. He had felt it when he and his
mother went in a little boat from Keyhaven to Alum Bay in the Isle of
Wight. There was no doubt in his mind. He was on a ship. But how, but
why? Who could have carried him all that way without waking him? Was
it magic? Accidental magic? The St. John's wort perhaps? And the
stone--it was not the same. It was new, clean cut, and, where the wind
displaced a corner of the curtain, dazzlingly white in the sunlight.

There was the pat pat of bare feet on the deck, a dull sort of
shuffling as though people were arranging themselves. And then people
outside the awning began to sing. It was a strange song, not at all
like any music you or I have ever heard. It had no tune, no more tune
than a drum has, or a trumpet, but it had a sort of wild rough
glorious exciting splendour about it, and gave you the sort of intense
all-alive feeling that drums and trumpets give.

Quentin lifted a corner of the purple curtain and looked out.

Instantly the song stopped, drowned in the deepest silence Quentin had
ever imagined. It was only broken by the flip-flapping of the sheets
against the masts of the ship. For it was a ship, Quentin saw that as
the bulwark dipped to show him an unending waste of sea, broken by
bigger waves than he had ever dreamed of. He saw also a crowd of men,
dressed in white and blue and purple and gold. Their right arms were
raised towards the sun, half of whose face showed across the sea--but
they seemed to be, as my old nurse used to say, 'struck so,' for their
eyes were not fixed on the sun, but on Quentin. And not in anger, he
noticed curiously, but with surprise and...could it be that they
were afraid of him?

Quentin was shivering with the surprise and newness of it all. He had
read about magic, but he had not wholly believed in it, and yet, now,
if this was not magic, what was it? You go to sleep on an old stone in
a ruin. You wake on the same stone, quite new, on a ship. Magic,
magic, if ever there was magic in this wonderful, mysterious world!

The silence became awkward. Some one had to say something.

'Good-morning,' said Quentin, feeling that he ought perhaps to be the
one.

Instantly every one in sight fell on his face on the deck.

Only one, a tall man with a black beard and a blue mantle, stood up
and looked Quentin in the eyes.

'Who are you?' he said. 'Answer, I adjure you by the Sacred Tau!' Now
this was very odd, and Quentin could never understand it, but when
this man spoke Quentin understood him perfectly, and yet at the same
time he knew that the man was speaking a foreign language. So that his
thought was not, 'Hullo, you speak English!' but 'Hullo, I can
understand your language.'

'I am Quentin De Ward,' he said.

'A name from other stars! How came you here?' asked the blue-mantled
man.

'I don't know,' said Quentin.

'He does not know. He did not sail with us. It is by magic that he is
here,' said Blue Mantle. 'Rise, all, and greet the Chosen of the
Gods.'

They rose from the deck, and Quentin saw that they were all bearded
men, with bright, earnest eyes, dressed in strange dress of something
like jersey and tunic and heavy golden ornaments.

'Hail! Chosen of the Gods,' cried Blue Mantle, who seemed to be the
leader.

'Hail, Chosen of the Gods!' echoed the rest.

'Thank you very much, I'm sure,' said Quentin.

'And what is this stone?' asked Blue Mantle, pointing to the stone on
which Quentin sat.

And Quentin, anxious to show off his knowledge, said

'I'm not quite sure, but I think it's the altar stone of Stonehenge.'

'It is proved,' said Blue Mantle. 'Thou art the Chosen of the Gods. Is
there anything my Lord needs?' he added humbly.

'I...I'm rather hungry,' said Quentin; 'it's a long time since
dinner, you know.'

They brought him bread and bananas, and oranges.

'Take,' said Blue Mantle, 'of the fruits of the earth, and specially
of this, which gives drink and meat and ointment to man,' suddenly
offering a large cocoa-nut.

Quentin took, with appropriate 'Thank you's' and 'You're very kind's.'

'Nothing,' said Blue Mantle, 'is too good for the Chosen of the Gods.
All that we have is yours, to the very last day of your life you have
only to command, and we obey. You will like to eat in seclusion. And
afterwards you will let us behold the whole person of the Chosen of
the Gods.'

Quentin retired into the purple tent, with the fruits and the cocoa-
nut. As you know, a cocoa-nut is not handy to get at the inside of, at
the best of times, so Quentin set that aside, meaning to ask Blue
Mantle later on for a gimlet and a hammer.

When he had had enough to eat he peeped out again. Blue Mantle was on
the watch and came quickly forward.

'Now,' said he, very crossly indeed, 'tell me how you got here. This
Chosen of the Gods business is all very well for the vulgar. But you
and I know that there is no such thing as magic.'

'Speak for yourself,' said Quentin. 'If I'm not here by magic I'm not
here at all.'

'Yes, you are,' said Blue Mantle.

'I know I am,' said Quentin, 'but if I'm not here by magic what am I
here by?'

'Stowawayishness,' said Blue Mantle.

'If you think that why don't you treat me as a stowaway?'

'Because of public opinion,' said Blue Mantle, rubbing his nose in an
angry sort of perplexedness.

'Very well,' said Quentin, who was feeling so surprised and bewildered
that it was a real relief to him to bully somebody. 'Now look here. I
came here by magic, accidental magic. I belong to quite a different
world from yours. But perhaps you are right about my being the Chosen
of the Gods. And I sha'n't tell you anything about my world. But I
command you, by the Sacred Tau' (he had been quick enough to catch and
remember the word), 'to tell me who you are, and where you come from,
and where you are going.'

Blue Mantle shrugged his shoulders. 'Oh, well,' he said, 'if you
invoke the sacred names of Power.... But I don't call it fair
play. Especially as you know perfectly well, and just want to browbeat
me into telling lies. I shall not tell lies. I shall tell you the
truth.'

'I hoped you would,' said Quentin gently.

'Well then,' said Blue Mantle, 'I am a Priest of Poseidon, and I come
from the great and immortal kingdom of Atlantis.'

'From the temple where the gold statue is, with the twelve sea-horses
in gold?' Quentin asked eagerly.

'Ah, I knew you knew all about it,' said Blue Mantle, 'so I don't need
to tell you that I am taking the sacred stone, on which you are
sitting (profanely if you are a mere stowaway, and not the Chosen of
the Gods) to complete the splendid structure of a temple built on a
great plain in the second of the islands which are our colonies in the
North East.'

'Tell me all about Atlantis,' said Quentin. And the priest, protesting
that Quentin knew as much about it as he did, told.

And all the time the ship was ploughing through the waves, sometimes
sailing, sometimes rowed by hidden rowers with long oars. And Quentin
was served in all things as though he had been a king. If he had
insisted that he was not the Chosen of the Gods everything might have
been different. But he did not. And he was very anxious to show how
much he knew about Atlantis. And sometimes he was wrong, the Priest
said, but much more often he was right.

'We are less than three days' journey now from the Eastern Isles,'
Blue Mantle said one day, 'and I warn you that if you are a mere
stowaway you had better own it. Because if you persist in calling
yourself the Chosen of the Gods you will be expected to act as such---
to the very end.'

'I don't call myself anything,' said Quentin, 'though I am not a
stowaway, anyhow, and I don't know how I came here--so of course it
was magic. It's simply silly your being so cross. I can't help being
here. Let's be friends.'

'Well,' said Blue Mantle, much less crossly, I never believed in
magic, though I am a priest, but if it is, it is. We may as well be
friends, as you call it. It isn't for very long, anyway,' he added
mysteriously.

And then to show his friendliness he took Quentin all over the ship,
and explained it all to him. And Quentin enjoyed himself thoroughly,
though every now and then he had to pinch himself to make sure that he
was awake. And he was fed well all the time, and all the time made
much of, so that when the ship reached land he was quite sorry. The
ship anchored by a stone quay, most solid and serviceable, and every
one was very busy.

Quentin kept out of sight behind the purple curtains. The sailors and
the priests and the priests' attendants and everybody on the boat had
asked him so many questions, and been so curious about his clothes,
that he was not anxious to hear any more questions asked, or to have
to invent answers to them.

And after a very great deal of talk--almost as much as Mr. Miles's
carrying had needed--the altar stone was lifted, Quentin, curtains,
awning and all, and carried along a gangway to the shore, and there it
was put on a sort of cart, more like what people in Manchester call a
lurry than anything else I can think of. The wheels were made of solid
circles of wood bound round with copper. And the cart was drawn by---
not horses or donkeys or oxen or even dogs--but by an enormous
creature more like an elephant than anything else, only it had long
hair rather like the hair worn by goats.

You, perhaps, would not have known what this vast creature was, but
Quentin, who had all sorts of out-of-the-way information packed in his
head, knew at once that it was a mammoth.

And by that he knew, too, that he had slipped back many thousands of
years, because, of course, it is a very long time indeed since there
were any mammoths alive, and able to draw lurries. And the car and the
priest and the priest's retinue and the stone and Quentin and the
mammoth journeyed slowly away from the coast, passing through great
green forests and among strange gray mountains.

Where were they journeying?

Quentin asked the same question you may be sure, and Blue Mantle told
him-

'To Stonehenge.' And Quentin understood him perfectly, though
Stonehenge was not the word Blue Mantle used, or anything like it.

The great temple is now complete,' he said, 'all but the altar stone.
It will be the most wonderful temple ever built in any of the colonies
of Atlantis. And it will be consecrated on the longest day of the
year.'

'Midsummer Day,' said Quentin thoughtlessly--and, as usual, anxious to
tell all he knew. 'I know. The sun strikes through the arch on to the
altar stone at sunrise. Hundreds of people go to see it: the ruins are
quite crowded sometimes, I believe.'

'Ruins?' said the priest in a terrible voice. 'Crowded? Ruins?'

'I mean,' said Quentin hastily, 'the sun will still shine the same way
even when the temple is in ruins, won't it?'

'The temple,' said the priest, 'is built to defy time. It will never
be in ruins.'

'That's all you know,' said Quentin, not very politely.

'It is not by any means all I know,' said the priest. 'I do not tell
all I know. Nor do you.'

'I used to,' said Quentin, 'but I sha'n't any more. It only leads to
trouble--I see that now.

Now, though Quentin had been intensely interested in everything he had
seen in the ship and on the journey, you may be sure he had not lost
sight of the need there was to get back out of this time of Atlantis
into his own time. He knew that he must have got into these Atlantean
times by some very simple accidental magic, and he felt no doubt that
he should get back in the same way. He felt almost sure that the
reverse-action, so to speak, of the magic would begin when the stone
got back to the place where it had lain for so many thousand years
before he happened to go to sleep on it, and to start--perhaps by the
St. John's wort--the accidental magic. If only, when he got back there
he could think of the compelling, the magic word!

And now the slow procession wound over the downs, and far away across
the plain, which was almost just the same then as it is now, Quentin
saw what he knew must be Stonehenge. But it was no longer the grey
pile of ruins that you have perhaps seen--or have, at any rate, seen
pictures of.

From afar one could see the gleam of yellow gold and red copper; the
flutter of purple curtains, the glitter and dazzle of shimmering
silver.

As they drew near to the spot Quentin perceived that the great stones
he remembered were overlaid with ornamental work, with vivid, bright-
coloured paintings. The whole thing was a great circular building,
every stone in its place. At a mile or two distant lay a town. And in
that town, with every possible luxury, served with every circumstance
of servile homage, Quentin ate and slept.

I wish I had time to tell you what that town was like where he slept
and ate, but I have not. You can read for yourself, some day, what
Atlantis was like. Plato tells us a good deal, and the Colonies of
Atlantis must have had at least a reasonable second-rate copy of the
cities of that fair and lovely land.

That night, for the first time since he had first gone to sleep on the
altar stone, Quentin slept apart from it. He lay on a wooden couch
strewn with soft bear-skins, and a woollen coverlet was laid over him.
And he slept soundly.

In the middle of the night, as it seemed, Blue Mantle woke him.

'Come,' he said, 'Chosen of the God--since you will be that, and no
stowaway--the hour draws nigh.'

The mammoth was waiting. Quentin and Blue Mantle rode on its back to
the outer porch of the new temple of Stonehenge. Rows of priests and
attendants, robed in white and blue and purple, formed a sort of
avenue up which Blue Mantle led the Chosen of the Gods, who was
Quentin. They took off his jacket and put a white dress on him, rather
like a night-shirt without sleeves. And they put a thick wreath of
London Pride on his head and another, larger and longer, round his
neck.

'If only the chaps at school could see me now!' he said to himself
proudly.

And by this time it was gray dawn.

'Lie down now,' said Blue Mantle, 'lie down, O Beloved of the Gods,
upon the altar stone, for the last time.'

'I shall be able to go, then?' Quentin asked. This accidental magic
was, he perceived, a tricky thing, and he wanted to be sure.

'You will not be able to stay,' said the priest. 'If going is what you
desire, the desire of the Chosen of the Gods is fully granted.'

The grass on the plain far and near rustled with the tread of many
feet; the cold air of dawn thrilled to the awed murmured of many
voices.

Quentin lay down, with his pink wreaths and his white robe, and
watched the quickening pinkiness of the East. And slowly the great
circle of the temple filled with white-robed folk, all carrying in
their hands the faint pinkiness of the flowers which we nowadays call
London Pride.

And all eyes were fixed on the arch through which, at sunrise on
Midsummer Day, the sun's first beam should fall upon the white, new,
clean altar stone. The stone is still there, after all these thousands
of years, and at sunrise on Midsummer Day the sun's first ray still
falls on it.

The sky grew lighter and lighter, and at last the sun peered redly
over the down, and the first ray of the morning sunlight fell full on
the altar stone and on the face of Quentin.

And, as it did so, a very tall, white-robed priest with a deer-skin
apron and a curious winged head-dress stepped forward. He carried a
great bronze knife, and he waved it ten times in the shaft of sunlight
that shot through the arch and on to the altar stone.

'Thus,' he cried, 'thus do I bathe the sacred blade in the pure
fountain of all light, all wisdom, all splendour. In the name of the
ten kings, the ten virtues, the ten hopes, the ten fears I make my
weapon clean! May this temple of our love and our desire endure for
ever, so long as the glory of our Lord the Sun is shed upon this
earth. May the sacrifice I now humbly and proudly offer be acceptable
to the gods by whom it has been so miraculously provided. Chosen of
the Gods! return to the gods who sent thee!'

A roar of voices rang through the temple. The bronze knife was raised
over Quentin. He could not believe that this, this horror, was the end
of all these wonderful happenings.

'No-no,' he cried, 'it's not true. I'm not the Chosen of the Gods! I'm
only a little boy that's got here by accidental magic!'

'Silence,' cried the priest, 'Chosen of the Immortals, close your
eyes! It will not hurt. This life is only a dream; the other life is
the real life. Be strong, be brave!'

Quentin was not brave. But he shut his eyes. He could not help it. The
glitter of the bronze knife in the sunlight was too strong for him.

He could not believe that this could really have happened to him.
Every one had been so kind--so friendly to him. And it was all for
this!

Suddenly a sharp touch at his side told him that for this, indeed, it
had all been. He felt the point of the knife.

'Mother!' he cried. And opened his eyes again.

He always felt quite sure afterwards that 'Mother' was the master-
word, the spell of spells. For when he opened his eyes there was no
priest, no white-robed worshippers, no splendour of colour and metal,
no Chosen of the Gods, no knife-only a little boy with a piece of
sacking over him, damp with the night dews, lying on a stone amid the
grey ruins of Stonehenge, and, all about him, a crowd of tourists who
had come to see the sun's first shaft strike the age-old altar of
Stonehenge on Midsummer Day in the morning. And instead of a knife
point at his side there was only the ferrule of the umbrella of an
elderly and retired tea merchant in a mackintosh and an Alpine hat,--a
ferrule which had prodded the sleeping boy so unexpectedly surprised
on the very altar stone where the sun's ray now lingered.

And then, in a moment, he knew that he had not uttered the spell in
vain, the word of compelling, the word of power: for his mother was
there kneeling beside him. I am sorry to say that he cried as he clung
to her. We cannot all of us be brave, always.

The tourists were very kind and interested, and the tea merchant
insisted on giving Quentin something out of a flask, which was so
nasty that Quentin only pretended to drink, out of politeness. His
mother had a carriage waiting, and they escaped to it while the
tourists were saying, 'How romantic!' and asking each other whatever
in the world had happened.

......

'But how did you come to be there, darling?' said his mother with warm
hands comfortingly round him. 'I've been looking for you all night. I
went to say good-bye to you yesterday--Oh, Quentin--and I found you'd
run away. How could you?'

'I'm sorry,' said Quentin, 'if it worried you, I'm sorry. Very, very.
I was going to telegraph to-day.'

'But where have you been? What have you been doing all night?' she
asked, caressing him.

'Is it only one night?' said Quentin. 'I don't know exactly what's
happened. It was accidental magic, I think, mother. I'm glad I thought
of the right word to get back, though.' And then he told her all about
it. She held him very tightly and let him talk.

Perhaps she thought that a little boy to whom accidental magic
happened all in a minute, like that, was not exactly the right little
boy for that excellent school in Salisbury. Anyhow she took him to
Egypt with her to meet his father, and, on the way, they happened to
see a doctor in London who said: 'Nerves' which is a poor name for
accidental magic, and Quentin does not believe it means the same thing
at all.

Quentin's father is well now, and he has left the army, and father and
mother and Quentin live in a jolly, little, old house in Salisbury,
and Quentin is a 'day boy' at that very same school. He and Smithson
minor are the greatest of friends. But he has never told Smithson
minor about the accidental magic. He has learned now, and learned very
thoroughly, that it is not always wise to tell all you know. If he had
not owned that he knew that it was the Stonehenge altar stone!

......

You may think that the accidental magic was all a dream, and that
Quentin dreamed it because his mother had told him so much about
Atlantis. But then, how do you account for his dreaming so much that
his mother had never told him? You think that that part wasn't true,
well, it may have been true for anything I know. And I am sure you
don't know more about it than I do.



IV. THE PRINCESS AND THE HEDGE-PIG

'BUT I don't see what we're to do,' said the Queen for the twentieth
time.

'Whatever we do will end in misfortune,' said the King gloomily;
you'll see it will.'

They were sitting in the honeysuckle arbour talking things over, while
the nurse walked up and down the terrace with the new baby in her
arms.

'Yes, dear,' said the poor Queen; 'I've not the slightest doubt I
shall.'

Misfortune comes in many ways, and you can't always know beforehand
that a certain way is the way misfortune will come by: but there are
things misfortune comes after as surely as night comes after day. For
instance, if you let all the water boil away, the kettle will have a
hole burnt in it. If you leave the bath taps running and the waste-
pipe closed, the stairs of your house will, sooner or later, resemble
Niagara. If you leave your purse at home, you won't have it with you
when you want to pay your tram-fare. And if you throw lighted wax
matches at your muslin curtains, your parent will most likely have to
pay five pounds to the fire engines for coming round and blowing the
fire out with a wet hose. Also if you are a king and do not invite the
wicked fairy to your christening parties, she will come all the same.
And if you do ask the wicked fairy, she will come, and in either case
it will be the worse for the new princess. So what is a poor monarch
to do? Of course there is one way out of the difficulty, and that is
not to have a christening party at all. But this offends all the good
fairies, and then where are you?

All these reflections had presented themselves to the minds of King
Ozymandias and his Queen, and neither of them could deny that they
were in a most awkward situation. They were 'talking it over' for the
hundredth time on the palace terrace where the pomegranates and
oleanders grew in green tubs and the marble balustrade is overgrown
with roses, red and white and pink and yellow. On the lower terrace
the royal nurse was walking up and down with the baby princess that
all the fuss was about. The Queen's eyes followed the baby admiringly.

'The darling!' she said. 'Oh, Ozymandias, don't you sometimes wish
we'd been poor people?'

'Never!' said the King decidedly.

'Well, I do,' said the Queen; 'then we could have had just you and me
and your sister at the christening, and no fear of--oh! I've thought
of something.'

The King's patient expression showed that he did not think it likely
that she would have thought of anything useful; but at the first five
words his expression changed. You would have said that he pricked up
his ears, if kings had ears that could be pricked up. What she said
was--

'Let's have a secret christening.'

'How?' asked the King.

The Queen was gazing in the direction of the baby with what is called
a 'far away look' in her eyes.

'Wait a minute,' she said slowly. 'I see it all--yes--we'll have the
party in the cellars--you know they're splendid.'

'My great-grandfather had them built by Lancashire men, yes,'
interrupted the King.

'We'll send out the invitations to look like bills. The baker's boy
can take them. He's a very nice boy. He made baby laugh yesterday when
I was explaining to him about the Standard Bread. We'll just put "1
loaf 3. A remittance at your earliest convenience will oblige."
That'll mean that 1 person is invited for 3 o'clock, and on the back
we'll write where and why in invisible ink. Lemon juice, you know. And
the baker's boy shall be told to ask to see the people just as they do
when they really mean earliest convenience--and then he shall just
whisper: deadly secret. Lemon juice. Hold it to the fire," and come
away. Oh, dearest, do say you approve!'

The King laid down his pipe, set his crown straight, and kissed the
Queen with great and serious earnestness.

'You are a wonder,' he said. 'It is the very thing. But the baker's
boy is very small. Can we trust him?'

'He is nine,' said the Queen, 'and I have sometimes thought that he
must be a prince in disguise. He is so very intelligent.'

The Queen's plan was carried out. The cellars, which were really
extraordinarily fine, were secretly decorated by the King's
confidential man and the Queen's confidential maid and a few of their
confidential friends whom they knew they could really trust. You would
never have thought they were cellars when the decorations were
finished. The walls were hung with white satin and white velvet, with
wreaths of white roses, and the stone floors were covered with freshly
cut turf with white daisies, brisk and neat, growing in it.

The invitations were duly delivered by the baker's boy. On them was
written in plain blue ink.

'THE R OYAL BAKERIES

'1 loaf 3d.

'An early remittance will oblige.'

And when the people held the letter to the fire, as they were
whisperingly instructed to do by the baker's boy, they read in a faint
brown writing:-

'King Ozymandias and Queen Eliza invite you to the christening of
their daughter Princess Ozyliza at three on Wednesday in the Palace
cellars.

'P.S.--We are obliged to be very secret and careful because of wicked
fairies, so please come disguised as a tradesman with a bill, calling
for the last time before it leaves your hands.'

You will understand by this that the King and Queen were not as well
off as they could wish; so that tradesmen calling at the palace with
that sort of message was the last thing likely to excite remark. But
as most of the King's subjects were not very well off either, this was
merely a bond between the King and his people. They could sympathise
with each other, and understand each other's troubles in a way
impossible to most kings and most nations.

You can imagine the excitement in the families of the people who were
invited to the christening party, and the interest they felt in their
costumes. The Lord Chief justice disguised himself as a shoemaker; he
still had his old blue brief-bag by him, and a brief-bag and a boot-
bag are very much alike. The Commander-in-Chief dressed as a dog's
meat man and wheeled a barrow. The Prime Minister appeared as a
tailor; this required no change of dress and only a slight change of
expression. And the other courtiers all disguised themselves
perfectly. So did the good fairies, who had; of course, been invited
first of all. Benevola, Queen of the Good Fairies, disguised herself
as a moonbeam, which can go into any palace and no questions asked.
Serena, the next in command, dressed as a butterfly, and all the other
fairies had disguises equally pretty and tasteful.

The Queen looked most kind and beautiful, the King very handsome and
manly, and all the guests agreed that the new princess was the most
beautiful baby they had ever seen in all their born days.

Everybody brought the most charming christening presents concealed
beneath their disguises. The fairies gave the usual gifts, beauty,
grace, intelligence, charm, and so on.

Everything seemed to be going better than well. But of course you know
it wasn't. The Lord High Admiral had not been able to get a cook's
dress large enough completely to cover his uniform; a bit of an
epaulette had peeped out, and the wicked fairy, Malevola, had spotted
it as he went past her to the palace back door, near which she had
been sitting disguised as a dog without a collar hiding from the
police, and enjoying what she took to be the trouble the royal
household were having with their tradesmen.

Malevola almost jumped out of her dog-skin when she saw the glitter of
that epaulette.

'Hullo?' she said, and sniffed quite like a dog. 'I must look into
this,' said she, and disguising herself as a toad, she crept unseen
into the pipe by which the copper emptied itself into the palace
moat---for of course there was a copper in one of the palace cellars
as there always is in cellars in the North Country.

Now this copper had been a great trial to the decorators. If there is
anything you don't like about your house, you can either try to
conceal it or 'make a feature of it.' And as concealment of the copper
was impossible, it was decided to 'make it a feature' by covering it
with green moss and planting a tree in it, a little apple tree all in
bloom. It had been very much admired.

Malevola, hastily altering her disguise to that of a mole, dug her way
through the earth that the copper was full of, got to the top and put
out a sharp nose just as Benevola was saying in that soft voice which
Malevola always thought so affected,-

'The Princess shall love and be loved all her life long.'

'So she shall,' said the wicked fairy, assuming her own shape amid the
screams of the audience. 'Be quiet, you silly cuckoo,' she said to the
Lord Chamberlain, whose screams were specially piercing, 'or I'll give
you a christening present too.'

Instantly there was a dreadful silence. Only Queen Eliza, who had
caught up the baby at Malevola's first word, said feebly,-

'Oh, don't, dear Malevola.'

And the King said, 'It isn't exactly a party, don't you know. Quite
informal. Just a few friends dropped in, eh, what?'

'So I perceive,' said Malevola, laughing that dreadful laugh of hers
which makes other people feel as though they would never be able to
laugh any more. 'Well, I've dropped in too. Let's have a look at the
child.'

The poor Queen dared not refuse. She tottered forward with the baby in
her arms.

'Humph!' said Malevola, 'your precious daughter will have beauty and
grace and all the rest of the tuppenny halfpenny rubbish those niminy-
piminy minxes have given her. But she will be turned out of her
kingdom. She will have to face her enemies without a single human
being to stand by her, and she shall never come to her own again until
she finds--' Malevola hesitated. She could not think of anything
sufficiently unlikely--' until she finds,' she repeated--

'A thousand spears to follow her to battle,' said a new voice, 'a
thousand spears devoted to her and to her alone.'

A very young fairy fluttered down from the little apple tree where she
had been hiding among the pink and white blossom.

'I am very young, I know,' she said apologetically, 'and I've only
just finished my last course of Fairy History. So I know that if a
fairy stops more than half a second in a curse she can't go on, and
some one else may finish it for her. That is so, Your Majesty, isn't
it?' she said, appealing to Benevola. And the Queen of the Fairies
said Yes, that was the law, only it was such an old one most people
had forgotten it.

'You think yourself very clever,' said Malevola, 'but as a matter of
fact you're simply silly. That's the very thing I've provided against.
She can't have any one to stand by her in battle, so she'll lose her
kingdom and every one will be killed, and I shall come to the funeral.
It will be enormous,' she added rubbing her hands at the joyous
thought.

'If you've quite finished,' said the King politely, 'and if you're
sure you won't take any refreshment, may I wish you a very good
afternoon?' He held the door open himself, and Malevola went out
chuckling. The whole of the party then burst into tears.

'Never mind,' said the King at last, wiping his eyes with the tails of
his ermine. 'It's a long way off and perhaps it won't happen after
all.'

......

But of course it did.

The King did what he could to prepare his daughter for the fight in
which she was to stand alone against her enemies. He had her taught
fencing and riding and shooting, both with the cross bow and the long
bow, as well as with pistols, rifles, and artillery. She learned to
dive and to swim, to run and to jump, to box and to wrestle, so that
she grew up as strong and healthy as any young man, and could, indeed,
have got the best of a fight with any prince of her own age. But the
few princes who called at the palace did not come to fight the
Princess, and when they heard that the Princess had no dowry except
the gifts of the fairies, and also what Malevola's gift had been, they
all said they had just looked in as they were passing and that they
must be going now, thank you. And went.

And then the dreadful thing happened. The tradesmen, who had for years
been calling for the last time before, etc., really decided to place
the matter in other hands. They called in a neighbouring king who
marched his army into Ozymandias's country, conquered the army--the
soldiers' wages hadn't been paid for years--turned out the King and
Queen, paid the tradesmen's bills, had most of the palace walls
papered with the receipts, and set up housekeeping there himself.

Now when this happened the Princess was away on a visit to her aunt,
the Empress of Oricalchia, half the world away, and there is no
regular post between the two countries, so that when she came home,
travelling with a train of fifty-four camels, which is rather slow
work, and arrived at her own kingdom, she expected to find all the
flags flying and the bells ringing and the streets decked in roses to
welcome her home.

Instead of which nothing of the kind. The streets were all as dull as
dull, the shops were closed because it was early-closing day, and she
did not see a single person she knew.

She left the fifty-four camels laden with the presents her aunt had
given her outside the gates, and rode alone on her own pet camel to
the palace, wondering whether perhaps her father had not received the
letter she had sent on ahead by carrier pigeon the day before.

And when she got to the palace and got off her camel and went in,
there was a strange king on her father's throne and a strange queen
sat in her mother's place at his side.

'Where's my father?' said the Princess, bold as brass, standing on the
steps of the throne. 'And what are you doing there?'

'I might ask you that,' said the King. 'Who are you, anyway?'

'I am the Princess Ozyliza,' said she.

'Oh, I've heard of you,' said the King. 'You've been expected for some
time. Your father's been evicted, so now you know. No, I can't give
you his address.'

Just then some one came and whispered to the Queen that fifty-four
camels laden with silks and velvets and monkeys and parakeets and the
richest treasures of Oricalchia were outside the city gate. She put
two and two together, and whispered to the King, who nodded and said:

'I wish to make a new law.'

Every one fell flat on his face. The law is so much respected in that
country.

'No one called Ozyliza is allowed to own property in this kingdom,'
said the King. 'Turn out that stranger.'

So the Princess was turned out of her father's palace, and went out
and cried in the palace gardens where she had been so happy when she
was little.

And the baker's boy, who was now the baker's young man, came by with
the standard bread and saw some one crying among the oleanders, and
went to say, 'Cheer up!' to whoever it was. And it was the Princess.
He knew her at once.

'Oh, Princess,' he said, 'cheer up! Nothing is ever so bad as it
seems.'

'Oh, Baker's Boy,' said she, for she knew him too, 'how can I cheer
up? I am turned out of my kingdom. I haven't got my father's address,
and I have to face my enemies without a single human being to stand by
me.'

'That's not true, at any rate,' said the baker's boy, whose name was
Erinaceus, 'you've got me. If you'll let me be your squire, I'll
follow you round the world and help you to fight your enemies.'

'You won't be let,' said the Princess sadly, 'but I thank you very
much all the same.'

She dried her eyes and stood up.

'I must go,' she said, 'and I've nowhere to go to.'

Now as soon as the Princess had been turned out of the palace, the
Queen said, 'You'd much better have beheaded her for treason.' And the
King said, 'I'll tell the archers to pick her off as she leaves the
grounds.'

So when she stood up, out there among the oleanders, some one on the
terrace cried, 'There she is!' and instantly a flight of winged arrows
crossed the garden. At the cry Erinaceus flung himself in front of
her, clasping her in his arms and turning his back to the arrows. The
Royal Archers were a thousand strong and all excellent shots.
Erinaceus felt a thousand arrows sticking into his back.

'And now my last friend is dead,' cried the Princess. But being a very
strong princess, she dragged him into the shrubbery out of sight of
the palace, and then dragged him into the wood and called aloud on
Benevola, Queen of the Fairies, and Benevola came.

'They've killed my only friend,' said the Princess, 'at least....
Shall I pull out the arrows?'

'If you do,' said the Fairy, 'he'll certainly bleed to death.'

'And he'll die if they stay in,' said the Princess.

'Not necessarily,' said the Fairy; 'let me cut them a little shorter.'
She did, with her fairy pocket-knife. 'Now,' she said, 'I'll do what I
can, but I'm afraid it'll be a disappointment to you both. Erinaceus,'
she went on, addressing the unconscious baker's boy with the stumps of
the arrows still sticking in him, 'I command you, as soon as I have
vanished, to assume the form of a hedge-pig. The hedgepig,' she
exclaimed to the Princess, 'is the only nice person who can live
comfortably with a thousand spikes sticking out of him. Yes, I know
there are porcupines, but porcupines are vicious and ill-mannered.
Good-bye!'

And with that she vanished. So did Erinaceus, and the Princess found
herself alone among the oleanders; and on the green turf was a small
and very prickly brown hedge-pig.

'Oh, dear!' she said, 'now I'm all alone again, and the baker's boy
has given his life for mine, and mine isn't worth having.'

'It's worth more than all the world,' said a sharp little voice at her
feet.

'Oh, can you talk?' she said, quite cheered.

'Why not?' said the hedge-pig sturdily; 'it's only the form of the
hedge--pig I've assumed. I'm Erinaceus inside, all right enough. Pick
me up in a corner of your mantle so as not to prick your darling
hands.'

'You mustn't call names, you know,' said the Princess, 'even your
hedge-pigginess can't excuse such liberties.'

'I'm sorry, Princess,' said the hedge-pig, 'but I can't help it. Only
human beings speak lies; all other creatures tell the truth. Now I've
got a hedge-pig's tongue it won't speak anything but the truth. And
the truth is that I love you more than all the world.'

'Well,' said the Princess thoughtfully, 'since you're a hedge-pig I
suppose you may love me, and I may love you. Like pet dogs or
goldfish. Dear little hedge-pig, then!'

'Don't!' said the hedge-pig, 'remember I'm the baker's boy in my mind
and soul. My hedge-pigginess is only skin-deep. Pick me up, dearest of
Princesses, and let us go to seek our fortunes.'

'I think it's my parents I ought to seek,' said the Princess. 'However...'

She picked up the hedge-pig in the corner of her mantle and they went
away through the wood.

They slept that night at a wood-cutter's cottage. The wood-cutter was
very kind, and made a nice little box of beech-wood for the hedge-pig
to be carried in, and he told the Princess that most of her father's
subjects were still loyal, but that no one could fight for him because
they would be fighting for the Princess too, and however much they
might wish to do this, Malevola's curse assured them that it was
impossible.

So the Princess put her hedge-pig in its little box and went on,
looking everywhere for her father and mother, and, after more
adventures than I have time to tell you, she found them at last,
living in quite a poor way in a semi-detached villa at Tooting. They
were very glad to see her, but when they heard that she meant to try
to get back the kingdom, the King said:

'I shouldn't bother, my child, I really shouldn't. We are quite happy
here. I have the pension always given to Deposed Monarchs, and your
mother is becoming a really economical manager.'

The Queen blush