dy; and she and the Lamb, having
been kissed by everybody and hugged as thoroughly as it is possible to
be when you're dressed for out-of-doors, were seen to the tram by the
boys. When the boys came back, every one looked at every one else and
said--

'Now!'

They locked the front door and they locked the back door, and they
fastened all the windows. They moved the table and chairs off the
carpet, and Anthea swept it.

'We must show it a LITTLE attention,' she said kindly. 'We'll give it
tea-leaves next time. Carpets like tea-leaves.'

Then every one put on its out-door things, because as Cyril said, they
didn't know where they might be going, and it makes people stare if you
go out of doors in November in pinafores and without hats.

Then Robert gently awoke the Phoenix, who yawned and stretched itself,
and allowed Robert to lift it on to the middle of the carpet, where it
instantly went to sleep again with its crested head tucked under its
golden wing as before. Then every one sat down on the carpet.

'Where shall we go?' was of course the question, and it was warmly
discussed. Anthea wanted to go to Japan. Robert and Cyril voted for
America, and Jane wished to go to the seaside.

'Because there are donkeys there,' said she.

'Not in November, silly,' said Cyril; and the discussion got warmer and
warmer, and still nothing was settled.

'I vote we let the Phoenix decide,' said Robert, at last. So they
stroked it till it woke. 'We want to go somewhere abroad,' they said,
'and we can't make up our minds where.'

'Let the carpet make up ITS mind, if it has one,' said the Phoenix.

'Just say you wish to go abroad.'

So they did; and the next moment the world seemed to spin upside down,
and when it was right way up again and they were ungiddy enough to look
about them, they were out of doors.

Out of doors--this is a feeble way to express where they were. They
were out of--out of the earth, or off it. In fact, they were floating
steadily, safely, splendidly, in the crisp clear air, with the pale
bright blue of the sky above them, and far down below the pale bright
sun-diamonded waves of the sea. The carpet had stiffened itself somehow,
so that it was square and firm like a raft, and it steered itself so
beautifully and kept on its way so flat and fearless that no one was at
all afraid of tumbling off. In front of them lay land.

'The coast of France,' said the Phoenix, waking up and pointing with
its wing.