when _I_ first came to school
I wasn't such a jolly fool!

Jim could never understand how Mother could have been clever enough
to do it. To the others it seemed nice, but natural. You see they had
always been used to having a mother who could write verses just like
the way people talk, even to the shocking expression at the end of the
rhyme, which was Jim's very own.

Jim taught Peter to play chess and draughts and dominoes, and altogether
it was a nice quiet time.

Only Jim's leg got better and better, and a general feeling began to
spring up among Bobbie, Peter, and Phyllis that something ought to be
done to amuse him; not just games, but something really handsome. But it
was extraordinarily difficult to think of anything.

"It's no good," said Peter, when all of them had thought and thought
till their heads felt quite heavy and swollen; "if we can't think of
anything to amuse him, we just can't, and there's an end of it. Perhaps
something will just happen of its own accord that he'll like."

"Things DO happen by themselves sometimes, without your making them,"
said Phyllis, rather as though, usually, everything that happened in the
world was her doing.

"I wish something would happen," said Bobbie, dreamily, "something
wonderful."

And something wonderful did happen exactly four days after she had said
this. I wish I could say it was three days after, because in fairy tales
it is always three days after that things happen. But this is not a
fairy story, and besides, it really was four and not three, and I am
nothing if not strictly truthful.

They seemed to be hardly Railway children at all in those days, and as
the days went on each had an uneasy feeling about this which Phyllis
expressed one day.

"I wonder if the Railway misses us," she said, plaintively. "We never go
to see it now."

"It seems ungrateful," said Bobbie; "we loved it so when we hadn't
anyone else to play with."

"Perks is always coming up to ask after Jim," said Peter, "and the
signalman's little boy is better. He told me so."

"I didn't mean the people," explained Phyllis; "I meant the dear Railway
itself."

"The thing I don't like," said Bobbie, on this fourth day, which was a
Tuesday, "is our having stopped waving to the 9.15 and sending our love
to Father by it."

"Let's begin again," said Phyllis. And they did.

Somehow the change of everything that was made by having servants in
the house and Mother not doing any wri