“Decent?” said Anthea; “it was very nice indeed of her. I think she’s a dear—”
“She’s just too frightfully nice for anything,” said Jane.
And they went home—very late for tea and unspeakably late for dinner. Martha scolded, of course. But the Lamb was safe.
“I say—it turned out we wanted the Lamb as much as anyone,” said Robert, later.
“Of course.”
“But do you feel different about it now the sun’s set?”
“No,” said all the others together.
“Then it’s lasted over sunset with us.”
“No, it hasn’t,” Cyril explained. “The wish didn’t do anything to us. We always wanted him with all our hearts when we were our proper selves, only we were all pigs this morning; especially you, Robert.” Robert bore this much with a strange calm.
“I certainly thought I didn’t want him this morning,” said he. “Perhaps I was a pig. But everything looked so different when we thought we were going to lose him.”
And that, my dear children, is the moral of this chapter. I did not mean it to have a moral, but morals are nasty forward beings, and will keep putting in their oars where they are not wanted. And since the moral has crept in, quite against my wishes, you might as well think of it next time you feel piggy yourself and want to get rid of any of your brothers and sisters. I hope this doesn’t often happen, but I daresay it has happened sometimes, even to you!
IV
Wings
The next day was very wet—too wet to go out, and far too wet to think of disturbing a Sand-fairy so sensitive to water that he still, after thousands of years, felt the pain of once having had his left whisker wetted. It was a long day, and it was not till the afternoon that all the children suddenly decided to write letters to their mother. It was Robert who had the misfortune to upset the ink-pot—an unusually deep and full one—straight into that part of Anthea’s desk where she had long pretended that an arrangement of gum and cardboard painted with Indian ink was a secret drawer. It was not exactly Robert’s fault; it was only his misfortune that he chanced to be lifting the ink across the desk just at the moment when Anthea had got it open, and that that same moment should have been the one chosen by the Lamb to get under the table and break his squeaking bird. There was a sharp convenient wire inside the bird, and of course the Lamb ran the wire into Robert’s leg at once; and so, without anyone’s meaning to, the secret drawer was flooded with ink. At the same time a stream was poured over Anthea’s half-finished letter.
So that her letter was something like this—
“Darling Mother—I hope you are quite well, and I hope Granny is better. The other day we …”
Then came a flood of ink, and at the bottom these words in pencil—
“It was not me upset the ink, but it took such a time clearing up, so no more as it is post-time.—From your loving daughter
Robert’s letter had not even been begun. He had been drawing a ship on the blotting paper while he was trying to think of what to say. And of course after the ink was upset he had to help Anthea to clean out her desk, and he promised to make her another secret drawer, better than the other. And she said, “Well, make it now.” So it was post-time and his letter wasn’t done. And the secret drawer wasn’t done either.
Cyril wrote a long letter, very fast, and then went to set a trap for slugs that he had read about in the Homemade Gardener, and when it was post-time the letter could not be found, and it never was found. Perhaps the slugs ate it.
Jane’s letter was the only one that went. She meant to tell her mother all about the Psammead—in fact they had all meant to do this—but she spent so long thinking how to spell the word that there was no time to tell the story properly, and it is useless to tell a story unless you do tell it properly, so she had to be contented with this—
“My dear Mother Dear—We are all as good as we can, like you told us to, and the Lamb has a little cold, but Martha says it is nothing, only he upset the goldfish into himself yesterday morning. When we were up at the sandpit the other day we went round by the safe way where carts go, and we found a—”
Half an hour went by before Jane felt quite sure that they could none of them spell Psammead. And they could not find it in the dictionary either, though they looked. Then Jane hastily finished her letter—
“We found a strange thing, but it is nearly post-time, so no more at present from your little girl,
Then the postman was heard blowing his horn, and Robert rushed out in the rain to stop his cart and give him the letters. And that was how it happened that, though all the children meant to tell their mother about the Sand-fairy, somehow or other she never got to know. There were other reasons why she never got to know, but these come later.
The next day Uncle Richard came and took them all to Maidstone in a wagonette—all except the Lamb. Uncle Richard was the very best kind of uncle. He bought them toys at Maidstone. He took them into a shop and let them choose exactly what they wanted, without any restrictions about price, and no nonsense about things being instructive. It is very wise to let children choose exactly what they like, because they are very foolish and
