aid Anthea, who generally tried to
give the conversation a cheerful turn.

'What's the good of TALKING?' said Cyril. 'What I want is for something
to happen. It's awfully stuffy for a chap not to be allowed out in the
evenings. There's simply nothing to do when you've got through your
homers.'

Jane finished the last of her home-lessons and shut the book with a
bang.

'We've got the pleasure of memory,' said she. 'Just think of last
holidays.'

Last holidays, indeed, offered something to think of--for they had
been spent in the country at a white house between a sand-pit and a
gravel-pit, and things had happened. The children had found a Psammead,
or sand-fairy, and it had let them have anything they wished for--just
exactly anything, with no bother about its not being really for their
good, or anything like that. And if you want to know what kind of things
they wished for, and how their wishes turned out you can read it all in
a book called Five Children and It (It was the Psammead). If you've not
read it, perhaps I ought to tell you that the fifth child was the baby
brother, who was called the Lamb, because the first thing he ever said
was 'Baa!' and that the other children were not particularly handsome,
nor were they extra clever, nor extraordinarily good. But they were not
bad sorts on the whole; in fact, they were rather like you.

'I don't want to think about the pleasures of memory,' said Cyril; 'I
want some more things to happen.'

'We're very much luckier than any one else, as it is,' said Jane. 'Why,
no one else ever found a Psammead. We ought to be grateful.'

'Why shouldn't we GO ON being, though?' Cyril asked--'lucky, I mean, not
grateful. Why's it all got to stop?'

'Perhaps something will happen,' said Anthea, comfortably. 'Do you know,
sometimes I think we are the sort of people that things DO happen to.'

'It's like that in history,' said Jane: 'some kings are full of
interesting things, and others--nothing ever happens to them, except
their being born and crowned and buried, and sometimes not that.'

'I think Panther's right,' said Cyril: 'I think we are the sort of
people things do happen to. I have a sort of feeling things would happen
right enough if we could only give them a shove. It just wants something
to start it. That's all.'

'I wish they taught magic at school,' Jane sighed. 'I believe if we
could do a little magic it might make something happen.'

'I wonder how you begin?' R