The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Amulet, by E. Nesbit

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Title: The Story of the Amulet

Author: E. Nesbit

Posting Date: August 6, 2008 [EBook #837]
Release Date: March, 1997

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF THE AMULET ***

Produced by Jo Churcher

THE STORY OF THE AMULET

by E. Nesbit

TO
Dr Wallis Budge
of the British Museum as a
small token of gratitude for his
unfailing kindness and help
in the making of it

CONTENTS

1. The Psammead
2. The Half Amulet
3. The Past
4. Eight Thousand Years Ago
5. The Fight in the Village
6. The Way to Babylon
7. 'The Deepest Dungeon Below the Castle Moat'
8. The Queen in London
9. Atlantis
10. The Little Black Girl and Julius Caesar
11. Before Pharaoh
12. The Sorry-Present and the Expelled Little Boy
13. The Shipwreck on the Tin Islands
14. The Heart's Desire

CHAPTER 1. THE PSAMMEAD

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white
house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they
had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes
were on long horns like snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out
like telescopes. It had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was
shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur--and it had hands
and feet like a monkey's. It told the children--whose names were
Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane--that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy.
(Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its
birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it had
been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its
fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give
people whatever they wished for. You know fairies have always been able
to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane now found their wishes come
true; but, somehow, they never could think of just the right things to
wish for, and their wishes sometim