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an impartial spirit, but it is very difficult to discuss anything thoroughly and at the same time to attend
faithfully to your baby brother's breakfast needs. The Baby was particularly lively that morning. He not
only wriggled his body through the bar of his high chair, and hung by his head, choking and purple, but he
collared a tablespoon with desperate suddenness, hit Cyril heavily on the head with it, and then cried
because it was taken away from him. He put his fat fist in his bread-and-milk, and demanded 'nam',
which was only allowed for tea. He sang, he put his feet on the table - he clamoured to 'go walky'. The
conversation was something like this:
'Look here - about that Sand-fairy - Look out! - he'll have the milk over.'
Milk removed to a safe distance.
'Yes - about that Fairy - No, Lamb dear, give Panther the narky poon.'
Then Cyril tried. 'Nothing we've had yet has turned out - He nearly had the mustard that time!'
'I wonder whether we'd better wish - Hullo! you've done it now, my boy!' And, in a flash of glass and
pink baby-paws, the bowl of golden carp in the middle of the table rolled on its side, and poured a flood
of mixed water and goldfish into the Baby's lap and into the laps of the others.
Everyone was almost as much upset as the goldfish: the Lamb only remaining calm. When the pool on
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the floor had been mopped up, and the leaping, gasping goldfish had been collected and put back in the
water, the Baby was taken away to be entirely redressed by Martha, and most of the others had to
change completely. The pinafores and jackets that had been bathed in goldfish-and-water were hung out
to dry, and then it turned out that Jane must either mend the dress she had torn the day before or appear
all day in her best petticoat. It was white and soft and frilly, and trimmed with lace, and very, very pretty,
quite as pretty as a frock, if not more so. Only it was NOT a frock, and Martha's word was law. She
wouldn't let Jane wear her best frock, and she refused to listen for a moment to Robert's suggestion that
Jane should wear her best petticoat and call it a dress.
'It's not respectable,' she said. And when people say that, it's no use anyone's saying anything. You
will find this out for yourselves some day.
So there was nothing for it but for Jane to mend her frock. The hole had been torn the day before
when she happened to tumble down in the High Street of Rochester, just where a water-cart had passed
on its silvery way. She had grazed her knee, and her stocking was much more than grazed, and her dress
was cut by the same stone which had attended to the knee and the stocking. Of course the others were
not such sneaks as to abandon a comrade in misfortune, so they all sat on the grass-plot round the
sundial, and Jane darned away for dear life. The Lamb was still in the hands of Martha having its clothes
changed, so conversation was possible.
Anthea and Robert timidly tried to conceal their inmost thought, which was that the Psammead was
not to be trusted; but Cyril said:
'Speak out - say what you've got to say - I hate hinting, and "don't know", and sneakish ways like
that.'
So then Robert said, as in honour bound: 'Sneak yourself - Anthea and me weren't so goldfishy as
you two were, so we got changed quicker, and we've had time to think it over, and if you ask me -'
'I didn't ask you,' said Jane, biting off a needleful of thread as she had always been strictly forbidden
to do.
'I don't care who asks or who doesn't,' said Robert, but Anthea and I think the Sammyadd is a
spiteful brute. If it can give us our wishes I suppose it can give itself its own, and I feel almost sure it
wishes every time that our wishes shan't do us any good. Let's let the tiresome beast alone, and just go
and have a jolly good game of forts, on our own, in the chalk-pit.'
(You will remember that the happily situated house where these children were spending their holidays
lay between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit.)
Cyril and Jane were more hopeful - they generally were.
'I don't think the Sammyadd does it on purpose,' Cyril said; 'and, after all, it WAS silly to wish for
boundless wealth. Fifty pounds in two-shilling pieces would have been much more sensible. And wishing
to be beautiful as the day was simply donkeyish. I don't want to be disagreeable, but it was. We must try
to find a really useful wish, and wish it.'
Jane dropped her work and said:
'I think so too, it's too silly to have a chance like this and not use it. I never heard of anyone else
outside a book who had such a chance; there must be simply heaps of things we could wish for that
wouldn't turn out Dead Sea fish, like these two things have. Do let's think hard, and wish something nice,
so that we can have a real jolly day - what there is left of it.'
Jane darned away again like mad, for time was indeed getting on, and everyone began to talk at once.
If you had been there you could not possibly have made head or tail of the talk, but these children were
used to talking 'by fours', as soldiers march, and each of them could say what it had to say quite
comfortably, and listen to the agreeable sound of its own voice, and at the same time have three-quarters
of two sharp ears to spare for listening to what the others said. That is an easy example in multiplication
of vulgar fractions, but, as I daresay you can't do even that, I won't ask you to tell me whether 3/4 X 2 =
1 1/2, but I will ask you to believe me that this was the amount of ear each child was able to lend to the
others. Lending ears was common in Roman times, as we learn from Shakespeare; but I fear I am getting
too instructive.
When the frock was darned, the start for the gravel-pit was delayed by Martha's insisting on
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everybody's washing its hands - which was nonsense, because nobody had been doing anything at all,
except Jane, and how can you get dirty doing nothing? That is a difficult question, and I cannot answer it
on paper. In real life I could very soon show you - or you me, which is much more likely.
During the conversation in which the six ears were lent (there were four children, so THAT sum
comes right), it had been decided that fifty pounds in two-shilling pieces was the right wish to have. And
the lucky children, who could have anything in the wide world by just wishing for it, hurriedly started for
the gravel-pit to express their wishes to the Psammead. Martha caught them at the gate, and insisted on
their taking the Baby with them.
'Not want him indeed! Why, everybody 'ud want him, a duck! with all their hearts they would; and
you know you promised your ma to take him out every blessed day,' said Martha.
'I know we did,' said Robert in gloom, 'but I wish the Lamb wasn't quite so young and small. It would
be much better fun taking him out.'
'He'll mend of his youngness with time,' said Martha; 'and as for his smallness, I don't think you'd
fancy carrying of him any more, however big he was. Besides he can walk a bit, bless his precious fat
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