It is quite a long time since the Imp and the Elf first started a guest-house for the water people. One day, when the Elf was very small, and I was showing her pictures in a book, and telling her about the sticklebacks, and the minnows, and the loaches, and the caddisworms, and all the rest of them, she sat silent for a long time, and then said suddenly, "I want to ask him," and wriggled down from my knee and went off to find the Imp. Presently they came back together. "We want to have some caddises for our own," they said, and I understood that the Elf had thought it only fair to consult the Imp before asking me about them for herself. That very day we began to plan the guest-house. At first it was to be no more than a jam pot, with mud in the bottom of it for the caddises. Then we thought that perhaps even a caddis would like a house a little bigger than a jam pot, or even than a big marmalade jar. Even caddises crawl. The next bigger thing to one of the big marmalade jars that they have in the nursery is a basin. And basins are no use at all. They tip over if you lean on their edges to look at anything that is crawling about inside. There was nothing for it but to plan something new. And, if we were to have something made on purpose, if we were to have a really big home for caddises, there was no reason why we should not plan it bigger still and be able to keep minnows in it, or goldfish, or even a smallish eel. So we spent a splendid afternoon planning the guest-house, and next morning walked over the fields to the village with a lot of scribblings in our hands. The scribbles were to explain what sort of a guest-house we wanted. We walked straight through the village to the glazier's shop. A glazier is a man who comes and mends windows when tennis-balls have gone through them and broken them. This glazier was very nice and kind. He let the Elf and the Imp climb up and sit on his table, while he looked over our scribbles, and then took a big sheet of paper and made a neat drawing himself. He made what he called a plan, and what he called an elevation, and then he drew a real picture of what the guest-house was to be, and put a curly fish with a winking eye swimming about in the middle. This picture he gave to the children, so that they could think about the guest-house while it was being made. He promised that we should have it in a week's time.