ver he could speak. It was like a child
saying a lesson it has just learned, and is afraid of forgetting before
it can get it said.

'I am a wicked magician. I have turned hundreds of people's heads in
that tree so that they fall into the sky, and when they fall back again,
as they have to do when the tide turns, I make them into apple-trees. I
don't know why I do, but I like to. I suppose it's because I'm wicked. I
never did anything useful with my magic, but I can hurt. And there's
only one way out of this, and I don't mean to show it you.'

'It's a pity you're so wicked,' said Diggory. 'I wish you were good.'

He threw down another apple, and instantly the magician became so good
that he could do nothing but sit down and cry to think how wicked he had
been. He was now perfectly useless. But Diggory was no longer afraid of
him, so he gathered the ten apples that were left and put them inside
his shirt, and came down the tree.

The old man couldn't tell him how to get out, and he couldn't disenchant
the fruit-trees or anything. So Diggory had to spend three wish-apples.
First he spent one on making the old man happy. This was done as it is
in Miss Edgeworth's stories--by giving him a thatched cottage and a
garden, and a devoted grand-daughter to look after him. The next apple
showed Diggory the Apple Door, which he had not been able to find, and
he went out by it. You, of course, can find it on the map, but he had no
map, and, besides, it is spelt differently. Before he went out of the
orchard he threw down another apple, and wished the apple-trees to be
disenchanted. And they were. And then the red-walled orchard was full of
Kings and Princesses, and swineherds and goosegirls, and statesmen and
stevedores, and every kind of person you can or can't think of.

Diggory left them to find their own ways home--some of them lived ever
so long before, and ever so far away--and he himself went out by the
Apple Door, and found his good white horse, who had been eating grass
very happily all the time he had been in the company of the magician,
and that had been two days and a night.

So Invicta was not hungry, but Diggory was; and, in fact, he was so
hungry that he had to use a wish-apple to get his supper, and that was
very, very wasteful of him, and he often regretted it in after years. It
is true that he wished for the best supper in the world, and had it; but
it was only bread-and-milk! If he had wished for the nicest s