ers upon."

"You are a smart child, Primrose, to be not yet in your teens," said
Eustace, taken rather aback by the piquancy of her criticism. "But you
well know, in your naughty little heart, that I have burnished the old
gold of Midas all over anew, and have made it shine as it never shone
before. And then that figure of Marygold! Do you perceive no nice
workmanship in that? And how finely I have brought out and deepened
the moral! What say you, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Clover, Periwinkle?
Would any of you, after hearing this story, be so foolish as to desire
the faculty of changing things to gold?"

"I should like," said Periwinkle, a girl of ten, "to have the power of
turning everything to gold with my right forefinger; but, with my left
forefinger, I should want the power of changing it back again, if the
first change did not please me. And I know what I would do, this very
afternoon!"

"Pray tell me," said Eustace.

"Why," answered Periwinkle, "I would touch every one of these golden
leaves on the trees with my left forefinger, and make them all green
again; so that we might have the summer back at once, with no ugly
winter in the mean time."

"O Periwinkle!" cried Eustace Bright, "there you are wrong, and would
do a great deal of mischief. Were I Midas, I would make nothing else
but just such golden days as these over and over again, all the year
throughout. My best thoughts always come a little too late. Why did
not I tell you how old King Midas came to America, and changed the
dusky autumn, such as it is in other countries, into the burnished
beauty which it here puts on? He gilded the leaves of the great volume
of Nature."

"Cousin Eustace," said Sweet Fern, a good little boy, who was always
making particular inquiries about the precise height of giants and the
littleness of fairies, "how big was Marygold, and how much did she
weigh after she was turned to gold?"

"She was about as tall as you are," replied Eustace, "and, as gold is
very heavy, she weighed at least two thousand pounds, and might have
been coined into thirty or forty thousand gold dollars. I wish
Primrose were worth half as much. Come, little people, let us clamber
out of the dell, and look about us."

They did so. The sun was now an hour or two beyond its noontide mark,
and filled the great hollow of the valley with its western radiance,
so that it seemed to be brimming with mellow light, and to spill it
over the surrounding hill-side