The Magic World

Edith Nesbit

Part 1
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.

Part 2
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.

Part 3
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.

Part 4
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 blushed with pleasure, and said, 'Thank you, dear. But if you should succeed in turning that wicked usurper out, Ozyliza, I hope I shall be a better queen than I used to be. I am learning housekeeping at an evening class at the Crown-maker's Institute.'

The Princess kissed her parents and went out into the garden to think it over. But the garden was small and quite full of wet washing hung on lines. So she went into the road, but that was full of dust and perambulators. Even the wet washing was better than that, so she went back and sat down on the grass in a white alley of tablecloths and sheets, all marked with a crown in indelible ink. And she took the hedge-pig out of the box. It was rolled up in a ball, but she stroked the little bit of soft forehead that you can always find if you look carefully at a rolled-up hedge-pig, and the hedge-pig uncurled and said:

'I am afraid I was asleep, Princess dear. Did you want me?'

'You're the only person who knows all about everything,' said she. 'I haven't told father and mother about the arrows. Now what do you advise?'

Erinaceus was flattered at having his advice asked, but unfortunately he hadn't any to give.

'It's your work, Princess,' he said. 'I can only promise to do anything a hedge-pig can do. It's not much. Of course I could die for you, but that's so useless.'

'Quite,' said she.

'I wish I were invisible,' he said dreamily.

'Oh, where are you?' cried Ozyliza, for the hedge-pig had vanished.

'Here,' said a sharp little voice. 'You can't see me, but I can see everything I want to see. And I can see what to do. I'll crawl into my box, and you must disguise yourself as an old French governess with the best references and answer the advertisement that the wicked king put yesterday in the "Usurpers Journal."'

The Queen helped the Princess to disguise herself, which, of course, the Queen would never have done if she had known about the arrows; and the King gave her some of his pension to buy a ticket with, so she went back quite quickly, by train, to her own kingdom.

The usurping King at once engaged the French governess to teach his cook to read French cookery books, because the best recipes are in French. Of course he had no idea that there was a princess, the Princess, beneath the governessial disguise. The French lessons were from 6 to 8 in the morning and from 2 to 4 in the afternoon, and all the rest of the time the governess could spend as she liked. She spent it walking about the palace gardens and talking to her invisible hedge-pig. They talked about everything under the sun, and the hedgepig was the best of company.

'How did you become invisible?' she asked one day, and it said, 'I suppose it was Benevola's doing. Only I think every one gets one wish granted if they only wish hard enough.'

On the fifty-fifth day the hedge-pig said, 'Now, Princess dear, I'm going to begin to get you back your kingdom.'

And next morning the King came down to breakfast in a dreadful rage with his face covered up in bandages.

'This palace is haunted,' he said. 'In the middle of the night a dreadful spiked ball was thrown in my face. I lighted a match. There was nothing.'

The Queen said, 'Nonsense! You must have been dreaming.'

But next morning it was her turn to come down with a bandaged face. And the night after, the King had the spiky ball thrown at him again. And then the Queen had it. And then they both had it, so that they couldn't sleep at all, and had to lie awake with nothing to think of but their wickedness. And every five minutes a very little voice whispered:

'Who stole the kingdom? Who killed the Princess?' till the King and Queen could have screamed with misery.

And at last the Queen said, 'We needn't have killed the Princess.'

And the King said, 'I've been thinking that, too.'

And next day the King said, 'I don't know that we ought to have taken this kingdom. We had a really high-class kingdom of our own.'

'I've been thinking that too,' said the Queen.

By this time their hands and arms and necks and faces and ears were very sore indeed, and they were sick with want of sleep.

'Look here,' said the King, 'let's chuck it. Let's write to Ozymandias and tell him he can take over his kingdom again. I've had jolly well enough of this.'

'Let's,' said the Queen, 'but we can't bring the Princess to life again. I do wish we could,' and she cried a little through her bandages into her egg, for it was breakfast time.

'Do you mean that,' said a little sharp voice, though there was no one to be seen in the room. The King and Queen clung to each other in terror, upsetting the urn over the toast-rack.

'Do you mean it?' said the voice again; 'answer, yes or no.'

'Yes,' said the Queen,' I don't know who you are, but, yes, yes, yes. I can't think how we could have been so wicked.'

'Nor I,' said the King.

'Then send for the French governess,' said the voice.

'Ring the bell, dear,' said the Queen. 'I'm sure what it says is right. It is the voice of conscience. I've often heard of it, but I never heard it before.'

The King pulled the richly jewelled bellrope and ten magnificent green and gold footmen appeared.

'Please ask Mademoiselle to step this way,' said the Queen.

The ten magnificent green and gold footmen found the governess beside the marble basin feeding the gold-fish, and, bowing their ten green backs, they gave the Queen's message. The governess who, every one agreed, was always most obliging, went at once to the pink satin breakfast-room where the King and Queen were sitting, almost unrecognisable in their bandages.

'Yes, Your Majesties?' said she curtseying.

'The voice of conscience,' said the Queen, 'told us to send for you. Is there any recipe in the French books for bringing shot princesses to life? If so, will you kindly translate it for us?'

'There is one,' said the Princess thoughtfully, 'and it is quite simple. Take a king and a queen and the voice of conscience. Place them in a clean pink breakfast-room with eggs, coffee, and toast. Add a full-sized French governess. The king and queen must be thoroughly pricked and bandaged, and the voice of conscience must be very distinct.'

'Is that all?' asked the Queen.

'That's all,' said the governess, 'except that the king and queen must have two more bandages over their eyes, and keep them on till the voice of conscience has counted fifty-five very slowly.'

'If you would be so kind,' said the Queen, 'as to bandage us with our table napkins? Only be careful how you fold them, because our faces are very sore, and the royal monogram is very stiff and hard owing to its being embroidered in seed pearls by special command.'

'I will be very careful,' said the governess kindly.

The moment the King and Queen were blindfolded, the 'voice of conscience' began, 'one, two, three,' and Ozyliza tore off her disguise, and under the fussy black-and-violet-spotted alpaca of the French governess was the simple slim cloth-of-silver dress of the Princess. She stuffed the alpaca up the chimney and the grey wig into the tea-cosy, and had disposed of the mittens in the coffee-pot and the elastic-side boots in the coal-scuttle, just as the voice of conscience said-

'Fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five!' and stopped.

The King and Queen pulled off the bandages, and there, alive and well, with bright clear eyes and pinky cheeks and a mouth that smiled, was the Princess whom they supposed to have been killed by the thousand arrows of their thousand archers.

Before they had time to say a word the Princess said:

'Good morning, Your Majesties. I am afraid you have had bad dreams. So have I. Let us all try to forget them. I hope you will stay a little longer in my palace. You are very welcome. I am so sorry you have been hurt.'

'We deserved it,' said the Queen, 'and we want to say we have heard the voice of conscience, and do please forgive us.'

'Not another word,' said the Princess, 'do let me have some fresh tea made. And some more eggs. These are quite cold. And the urn's been upset. We'll have a new breakfast. And I arms so sorry your faces are so sore.'

'If you kissed them,' said the voice which the King and Queen called the voice of conscience, 'their faces would not be sore any more.'

'May I?' said Ozyliza, and kissed the King's ear and the Queen's nose, all she could get at through the bandages.

And instantly they were quite well.

They had a delightful breakfast. Then the King caused the royal household to assemble in the throne-room, and there announced that, as the Princess had come to claim the kingdom, they were returning to their own kingdom by the three-seventeen train on Thursday.

Every one cheered like mad, and the whole town was decorated and illuminated that evening. Flags flew from every house, and the bells all rang, just as the Princess had expected them to do that day when she came home with the fifty-five camels. All the treasure these had carried was given back to the Princess, and the camels themselves were restored to her, hardly at all the worse for wear.

The usurping King and Queen were seen off at the station by the Princess, and parted from her with real affection. You see they weren't completely wicked in their hearts, but they had never had time to think before. And being kept awake at night forced them to think.

And the 'voice of conscience' gave them something to think about.

They gave the Princess the receipted bills, with which most of the palace was papered, in return for board and lodging.

When they were gone a telegram was sent off.

Ozymandias Rex, Esq.. Chatsworth. Delamere Road. Tooting. England.

Please come home at once. Palace vacant. Tenants have left.— ZYLIZA P.

And they came immediately.

When they arrived the Princess told them the whole story, and they kissed and praised her, and called her their deliverer and the saviour of her country.

'I haven't done anything,' she said. 'It was Erinaceus who did everything, and… .'

'But the fairies said,' interrupted the King, who was never clever at the best of times, 'that you couldn't get the kingdom back till you had a thousand spears devoted to you, to you alone.'

'There are a thousand spears in my back,' said a little sharp voice, 'and they are all devoted to the Princess and to her alone.'

'Don't!' said the King irritably. 'That voice coming out of nothing makes me jump.'

'I can't get used to it either,' said the Queen. 'We must have a gold cage built for the little animal. But I must say I wish it was visible.'

'So do I,' said the Princess earnestly. And instantly it was. I suppose the Princess wished it very hard, for there was the hedge-pig with its long spiky body and its little pointed face, its bright eyes, its small round ears, and its sharp, turned-up nose.

It looked at the Princess but it did not speak.

'Say something now,' said Queen Eliza. 'I should like to see a hedge- pig speak.'

'The truth is, if speak I must, I must speak the truth,' said Erinaceus. 'The Princess has thrown away her life-wish to make me visible. I wish she had wished instead for something nice for herself.'

'Oh, was that my life-wish?' cried the Princess. 'I didn't know, dear Hedge-pig, I didn't know. If I'd only known, I would have wished you back into your proper shape.'

'If you had,' said the hedge-pig, 'it would have been the shape of a dead man. Remember that I have a thousand spears in my back, and no man can carry those and live.'

The Princess burst into tears.

'Oh, you can't go on being a hedge-pig for ever,' she said, 'it's not fair. I can't bear it. Oh Mamma! Oh Papa! Oh Benevola!'

And there stood Benevola before them, a little dazzling figure with blue butterfly's wings and a wreath of moonshine.

'Well?' she said, 'well?'

'Oh, you know,' said the Princess, still crying. 'I've thrown away my life-wish, and he's still a hedge-pig. Can't you do anything?'

'I can't,' said the Fairy, 'but you can. Your kisses are magic kisses. Don't you remember how you cured the King and Queen of all the wounds the hedge-pig made by rolling itself on to their faces in the night?'

'But she can't go kissing hedge-pigs,' said the Queen, 'it would be most unsuitable. Besides it would hurt her.'

But the hedge-pig raised its little pointed face, and the Princess took it up in her hands. She had long since learned how to do this without hurting either herself or it. She looked in its little bright eyes.

'I would kiss you on every one of your thousand spears,' she said, 'to give you what you wish.'

'Kiss me once,' it said, 'where my fur is soft. That is all I wish, and enough to live and die for.'

She stooped her head and kissed it on its forehead where the fur is soft, just where the prickles begin.

And instantly she was standing with her hands on a young man's shoulders and her lips on a young man's face just where the hair begins and the forehead leaves off. And all round his feet lay a pile of fallen arrows.

She drew back and looked at him.

'Erinaceus,' she said, 'you're different—from the baker's boy I mean.'

'When I was an invisible hedge-pig,' he said, 'I knew everything. Now I have forgotten all that wisdom save only two things. One is that I am a king's son. I was stolen away in infancy by an unprincipled baker, and I am really the son of that usurping King whose face I rolled on in the night. It is a painful thing to roll on your father's face when you are all spiky, but I did it, Princess, for your sake, and for my father's too. And now I will go to him and tell him all, and ask his forgiveness.'

'You won't go away?' said the Princess. 'Ah! don't go away. What shall I do without my hedge-pig?'

Erinaceus stood still, looking very handsome and like a prince.

'What is the other thing that you remember of your hedge-pig wisdom?' asked the Queen curiously. And Erinaceus answered, not to her but to the Princess:

'The other thing, Princess, is that I love you.'

'Isn't there a third thing, Erinaceus?' said the Princess, looking down.

'There is, but you must speak that, not I.'

'Oh,' said the Princess, a little disappointed, 'then you knew that I loved you?'

'Hedge-pigs are very wise little beasts,' said Erinaceus, 'but I only knew that when you told it me.'

'I—told you?'

'When you kissed my little pointed face, Princess,' said Erinaceus, 'I knew then.'

'My goodness gracious me,' said the King.

'Quite so,' said Benevola, 'and I wouldn't ask any one to the wedding.'

'Except you, dear,' said the Queen.

'Well, as I happened to be passing… there's no time like the present,' said Benevola briskly. 'Suppose you give orders for the wedding bells to be rung now, at once!'

Part 5
SEPTIMUS SEPTIMUSSON