Fairies -- Fiction; Great Britain -- History -- Edward VII, 1901-1910 -- Fiction; Siblings -- Fiction; Wishes -- Fiction
"Friends, Romans, countrymen--and women--we found a Sammyadd. We have
had wishes. We've had wings, and being beautiful as the day--ugh!--that
was pretty jolly beastly if you like--and wealth and castles, and that
rotten gipsy business with the Lamb. But we're no forrarder. We haven't
really got anything worth having for our wishes."
"We've had things happening," said Robert; "that's always something."
"It's not enough, unless they're the right things," said Cyril firmly.
"Now I've been thinking"--
"Not really?" whispered Robert.
"In the silent what's-its-names of the night. It's like suddenly being
asked something out of history--the date of the Conquest or something;
you know it all right all the time, but when you're asked it all goes
out of your head. Ladies and gentlemen, you know jolly well that when
we're all rotting about in the usual way heaps of things keep cropping
up, and then real earnest wishes come into the heads of the beholder"--
"Hear, hear!" said Robert.
"--of the beholder, however, stupid he is," Cyril went on. "Why, even
Robert might happen to think of a really useful wish if he didn't injure
his poor little brains trying so hard to think.--Shut up, Bobs, I tell
you!--You'll have the whole show over."
A struggle on the edge of a water-butt is exciting but damp. When it was
over, and the boys were partially dried, Anthea said--
"It really was you began it, Bobs. Now honour is satisfied, do let
Squirrel go on. We're wasting the whole morning."
"Well then," said Cyril, still wringing the water out of the tails of
his jacket, "I'll call it pax if Bobs will."
"Pax then," said Robert sulkily. "But I've got a lump as big as a
cricket ball over my eye."
Anthea patiently offered a dust-coloured handkerchief, and Robert bathed
his wounds in silence. "Now, Squirrel," she said.
"Well then--let's just play bandits, or forts, or soldiers, or any of
the old games. We're dead sure to think of something if we try not to.
You always do."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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