am off him again, and this interesting
work took people's minds off the carpet, and nothing more was said just
then about its badness as a bargain and about what mother hoped for from
coconut matting.

When the Lamb was clean again he had to be taken care of while mother
rumpled her hair and inked her fingers and made her head ache over the
difficult and twisted house-keeping accounts which cook gave her on
dirty bits of paper, and which were supposed to explain how it was that
cook had only fivepence-half-penny and a lot of unpaid bills left out
of all the money mother had sent her for house-keeping. Mother was very
clever, but even she could not quite understand the cook's accounts.

The Lamb was very glad to have his brothers and sisters to play with
him. He had not forgotten them a bit, and he made them play all the old
exhausting games: 'Whirling Worlds', where you swing the baby round and
round by his hands; and 'Leg and Wing', where you swing him from side
to side by one ankle and one wrist. There was also climbing Vesuvius.
In this game the baby walks up you, and when he is standing on your
shoulders, you shout as loud as you can, which is the rumbling of the
burning mountain, and then tumble him gently on to the floor, and roll
him there, which is the destruction of Pompeii.

'All the same, I wish we could decide what we'd better say next time
mother says anything about the carpet,' said Cyril, breathlessly ceasing
to be a burning mountain.

'Well, you talk and decide,' said Anthea; 'here, you lovely ducky Lamb.
Come to Panther and play Noah's Ark.'

The Lamb came with his pretty hair all tumbled and his face all dusty
from the destruction of Pompeii, and instantly became a baby snake,
hissing and wriggling and creeping in Anthea's arms, as she said--

'I love my little baby snake,
He hisses when he is awake,
He creeps with such a wriggly creep,
He wriggles even in his sleep.'

'Crocky,' said the Lamb, and showed all his little teeth. So Anthea went
on--

'I love my little crocodile,
I love his truthful toothful smile;
It is so wonderful and wide,
I like to see it--FROM OUTSIDE.'

'Well, you see,' Cyril was saying; 'it's just the old bother. Mother
can't believe the real true truth about the carpet, and--'

'You speak sooth, O Cyril,' remarked the Phoenix, coming out from the
cupboard where the blackbeetles lived, and the torn books, and the
broken