you," said Jane, biting off a needleful of thread as she
had always been strictly forbidden to do. (Perhaps you don't know that
if you bite off ends of cotton and swallow them they wind tight round
your heart and kill you? My nurse told me this, and she told me also
about the earth going round the sun. Now what is one to believe--what
with nurses and science?)

"I don't care who asks or who doesn't," said Robert, "but Anthea and I
think the Sammyadd is a spiteful brute. If it can give us our wishes I
suppose it can give itself its own, and I feel almost sure it wishes
every time that our wishes shan't do us any good. Let's let the tiresome
beast alone, and just go and have a jolly good game of forts, on our
own, in the chalk-pit."

(You will remember that the happily-situated house where these children
were spending their holidays lay between a chalk-quarry and a
gravel-pit.)

Cyril and Jane were more hopeful--they generally were.

"I don't think the Sammyadd does it on purpose," Cyril said; "and, after
all, it _was_ silly to wish for boundless wealth. Fifty pounds in
two-shilling pieces would have been much more sensible. And wishing to
be beautiful as the day was simply donkeyish. I don't want to be
disagreeable, but it _was_. We must try to find a really useful wish,
and wish it."

Jane dropped her work and said--

"I think so too, it's too silly to have a chance like this and not use
it. I never heard of anyone else outside a book who had such a chance;
there must be simply heaps of things we could wish for that wouldn't
turn out Dead Sea fish, like these two things have. Do let's think hard
and wish something nice, so that we can have a real jolly day--what
there is left of it."

Jane darned away again like mad, for time was indeed getting on, and
everyone began to talk at once. If you had been there you could not
possibly have made head or tail of the talk, but these children were
used to talking "by fours," as soldiers march, and each of them could
say what it had to say quite comfortably, and listen to the agreeable
sound of its own voice, and at the same time have three-quarters of two
sharp ears to spare for listening to what the others said. That is an
easy example in multiplication of vulgar fractions, but, as I daresay
you can't do even that, I won't ask you to tell me whether 3/4 x 2 =
1-1/2, but I will ask you to believe me that this was the amount of ear
each child was able to lend to the other