Oh, how proud the little girl was. How bravely she set to work, and cut five of the biggest slices you ever saw, and gave them to her brothers and sisters, and was just going to take the sixth slice for herself, when she remembered the Brownie. "I beg your pardon," said she, as politely as he, though she was such a very little girl, and turned round to the wee brown man. But he was nowhere to be seen. The slices of cake in the children's hands remained cake, and uncommonly good it was, and such substantial eating that it did nearly the same as dinner; but the cake itself turned suddenly to a stone again, and the knife into a bit of stick. For there was the Gardener coming clumping along by the bank of the lake, and growling as he went. "Have you got the kangaroo?" shouted the children, determined to be civil, if possible. "This place is bewitched, I think," said he, "The kangaroo was fast asleep in the cow-shed. What! how dare you laugh at me?" But they hadn't laughed at all. And they found it no laughing matter, poor children, when Gardener came on the ice, and began to scold them and order them about. He was perfectly savage with crossness; for the people at Giles's Farm had laughed at him very much, and he did not like to be laughed at--and at the top of the field he had by chance met his mistress, and she asked him severely how he could think of leaving the children alone. Altogether, his conscience pricked him a good deal, and when people's consciences prick them, sometimes they get angry with other people, which is very silly, and only makes matters worse. "What have you been doing all this time?" said he. "All this five minutes?" said the oldest boy, mischievously; for Gardener was only to be away five minutes, and he had staid a full hour. Also, when he fumbled in his pocket for the children's lunch--to stop their tongues, perhaps--he found it was not there. They set up a great outcry; for, in spite of the cake, they could have eaten a little more. Indeed, the frost had such an effect upon all their appetites, that they felt not unlike that celebrated gentleman of whom it is told that "He ate a cow, and ate a calf, He ate an ox, and ate a half; He ate a church, he ate the steeple, He ate the priest, and all the people, And said he hadn't had enough then." "We're so hungry, so very hungry! Couldn't you go back again and fetch us some dinner?" cried they, entreatingly. "Not I, indeed. You may go back to dinner yourselves. You shall, indeed, for I want my dinner too. Two hours is plenty long enough to stop on the ice." "It isn't two hours--it's only one." "Well, one will do better than more. You're all right now--and you might soon tumble in, or break your legs on the slide. So come away home." It wasn't kind of Gardener, and I don't wonder the children felt it hard; indeed, the eldest boy resisted stoutly.