upper it
would have been different, no doubt.

Diggory rode on anxiously, arranging what wishes he should have with
the rest of the apples, but in the dusk he missed his way and was nearly
drowned in a rain-flooded ford, and poor white Invicta was quite carried
away.

Then Diggory took off his shirt to wring the water out, and as he took
it off he said: 'I wish I had my good white horse again.'

And as he said it all the apples but one tumbled out of his shirt on to
the ground, and he heard soft neighings and stampings and hustlings and
rustlings all round him in the dark, and when the moon rose he saw that
he had had his wish--he had his good white horse back again. But as he
had dropped eight apples, he had his good white horse back eight times,
and as eight times one is eight, he had now eight good white horses, all
called Invicta.

'Well, eight horses are better than nothing!' he said; and when he had
tethered the horses he went to sleep, for he felt strangely feeble and
tired.

In the morning he woke with pains in every limb. He thought it was a
cold from the wetting in the ford, but it was really rheumatism. And he
could not get rid of it. He tied seven horses together and led them,
riding on the eighth.

'Eight horses are a pretty good fortune for a woodcutter's son,' he said
to himself, 'and, anyway, I'm too tired to go looking for any better
one.'

So he rode home.

He knew the roads well enough, and yet they seemed different; they were
much better roads to ride over, for one thing, and the hedges and trees
were odd somehow. And the big wood near his father's house seemed very
small as he looked down on it from the hill. But when he got to the
village he thought he must have gone mad, for in the day and two nights
and a day that he had been away the village had grown big and ugly and
yellow-bricky, and there were eight shops and six public-houses besides
the Bill and Billet, and many more people than there used to be, all in
ugly, untidy clothes, and the Round Mound windmill was _gone_! The
people came crowding round him.

'What's become of the mill?' he asked, trembling all over.

The boys and girls and men and women stared, and a very old man stepped
out of the crowd.

'It were pulled down,' he said, 'when I were a boy.'

'And the woodcutter's cottage?'

'That were burnt down a matter of fifty year ago. Was you a native of
these parts, old man?'

There was a large plate-glass shop-window j