Chapter V: Part 5

“So we could! How clever you are, Fabe,” said Rosamund. And she admired her brother very much. So they took the poker and the tongs. The front of the bureau got a little scratched, but the top drawer came open, and there they saw two boxes with glass tops and narrow gold paper going all round; though you could only see paper shavings through the glass they knew it was soldiers. Besides these boxes there was a doll and a donkey standing on a green grass plot that had wooden wheels, and a little wicker-work doll’s cradle, and some brass cannons, and a bag that looked like marbles, and some flags, and a mouse that seemed as though it moved with clockwork; only, of course, they had promised not to touch the drawer, so they could not make sure. There was a wooden box, too, and it was wrong way up and on the bottom of it was written in pencil, “Vill: and anim: 5/9-1/2.” They looked at each other, and Fabian said:

“I wish it was to-morrow!”

You have seen that Fabian was quite a clever boy; and he knew at once that these were the Christmas presents which Santa Claus had brought for him and Rosamund. But Rosamund said, “Oh dear, I wish we hadn’t!”

However, she consented to open the other drawer—without touching it, of course, because she had promised faithfully—and when, with the poker and tongs, the other drawer came open, there were large wooden boxes—the kind that hold raisins and figs—and round boxes with paper on—smooth on the top and folded in pleats round the edge; and the children knew what was inside without looking. Every one knows what candied fruit looks like on the outside of the box. There were square boxes, too—the kind that have crackers in—with a cracker going off on the lid, very different in size and brightness from what it does really, for, as no doubt you know, a cracker very often comes in two quite calmly, without any pop at all, and then you only have the motto and the sweet, which is never nice. Of course, if there is anything else in the cracker, such as brooches or rings, you have to let the little girl who sits next you at supper have it.

When they had pushed back the drawer Fabian said—

“Let us pull out the writing drawer and make a castle.”

So they pulled the drawer out and put it on the floor. Please do not try to do this if your father has a bureau, because it leads to trouble. It was only because this one was broken that they were able to do it.

Then they began to build. They had the two boxes of bricks—the wooden bricks with the pillars and the coloured glass windows, and the rational bricks which are made of clay like tiles, and their father called them the All-Wool bricks, which seems silly, only of course grown-up people always talk sense. When all the bricks were used up they got the pretty picture blocks that kind Uncle Thomas gave them, and they built with these; but one box of blocks does not go far. Picture blocks are only good for building, except just at first. When you have made the pictures a few times you know exactly how they go, and then what’s the good? This is a fault which belongs to many very expensive toys. These blocks had six pictures—Windsor Castle with the Royal Standard hoisted; ducks in a pond, with a very handsome green and blue drake; Rebecca at the well; a snowball fight—but none of the boys knew how to chuck a snowball; the Harvest Home; and the Death of Nelson.

These did not go far, as I said. There are six times as few blocks as there are pictures, because every block has six sides. If you don’t understand this it shows they don’t teach arithmetic at your school, or else that you don’t do your home lessons.

But the best of a library is the books. Rosamund and Fabian made up with books. They got Shakespeare in fourteen volumes, and Rollin’s “Ancient History,” and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” and “The Beauties of Literature” in fifty-six fat little volumes, and they built not only a castle, but a town—and a big town—that presently towered high above them on the top of the bureau.

“It’s almost big enough to get into,” said Fabian, “if we had some steps.” So they made steps with the “British Essayists,” the “Spectator,” and the “Rambler,” and the “Observer,” and the “Tatler”; and when the steps were done they walked up them.

You may think that they could not have walked up these steps and into a town they had built themselves, but I assure you people have often done it, and anyway this is a true story. They had made a lovely gateway with two fat volumes of Macaulay and Milton’s poetical works on top, and as they went through it they felt all the feelings which people have to feel when they are tourists and see really fine architecture. (Architecture means buildings, but it is a grander word, as you see.)

Rosamund and Fabian simply walked up the steps into the town they had built. Whether they got larger or the town got smaller, I do not pretend to say. When they had gone under the great gateway they found that they were in a street which they could not remember building. But they were not disagreeable about it, and they said it was a very nice street all the same.

There was a large square in the middle of the town, with seats, and there they sat down, in the town they had made, and wondered how they could have been so clever as to build it. Then they went to the walls of the town—high, strong walls built of the Encyclopedia and the Biographical Dictionary—and far away over the brown plain of the carpet they saw a great thing like a square mountain. It was very shiny. And as they looked at it a great slice of it pushed itself out, and Fabian saw the brass handles shine, and he said:

“Why, Rom, that’s the bureau.”

“It’s larger than I want it to be,” said Rosamund, who was a little frightened. And indeed it did seem to be an extra size, for it was higher than the town.

The drawer of the great mountain bureau opened slowly, and the children could see something moving inside; then they saw the glass lid of one of the boxes go slowly up till it stood on end and looked like one side of the Crystal Palace, it was so large—and inside the box they saw something moving. The shavings and tissue-paper and the cotton-wool heaved and tossed like a sea when it is rough and you wish you had not come for a sail. And then from among the heaving whiteness came out a blue soldier, and another and another. They let themselves down from the drawer with ropes of shavings, and when they were all out there were fifty of them—foot soldiers with rifles and fixed bayonets, as well as a thin captain on a horse and a sergeant and a drummer.

The drummer beat his drum and the whole company formed fours and marched straight for the town. They seemed to be quite full-size soldiers—indeed, _extra_ large.

The children were very frightened. They left the walls and ran up and down the streets of the town trying to find a place to hide.

“Oh, there’s our very own house,” cried Rosamund at last; “we shall be safe there.” She was surprised as well as pleased to find their own house inside the town they had built.

So they ran in, and into the library, and there was the bureau and the castle they had built, and it was all small and quite the proper size. But when they looked out of the window it was not their own street, but the one they had built; they could see two volumes of the “Beauties of Literature” and the head of Rebecca in the house opposite, and down the street was the Mausoleum they had built after the pattern given in the red and yellow book that goes with the All-Wool bricks. It was all very confusing.

Suddenly, as they stood looking out of the windows, they heard a shouting, and there were the blue soldiers coming along the street by twos, and when the Captain got opposite their house he called out—

“Fabian! Rosamund! come down!”

And they had to, for they were very much frightened.

Then the Captain said—

“We have taken this town, and you are our prisoners. Do not attempt to escape, or I don’t know what will happen to you.”

The children explained that they had built the town, so they thought it was theirs; but the captain said very politely—

“That doesn’t follow at all. It’s our town now. And I want provisions for my soldiers.”

“We haven’t any,” said Fabian, but Rosamund nudged him, and said, “Won’t the soldiers be very fierce if they are hungry?”

The Blue Captain heard her, and said—

“You are quite right, little girl. If you have any food, produce it. It will be a generous act, and may stop any unpleasantness. My soldiers _are_ very fierce. Besides,” he added in a lower tone, speaking behind his hand, “you need only feed the soldiers in the usual way.”

When the children heard this their minds were made up.

“If you do not mind waiting a minute,” said Fabian, politely, “I will bring down any little things I can find.”

Then he took his tongs, and Rosamund took the poker, and they opened the drawer where the raisins and figs and dried fruits were—for everything in the library in the town was just the same as in the library at home—and they carried them out into the big square where the Captain had drawn up his blue regiment. And here the soldiers were fed. I suppose you know how tin soldiers are fed? But children learn so little at school nowadays that I daresay you don’t, so I will tell you. You just put a bit of the fig or raisin, or whatever it is, on the soldier’s tin bayonet—or his sword, if he is a cavalry man—and you let it stay on till you are tired of playing at giving the soldiers rations, and then of course _you eat it for him_. This was the way in which Fabian and Rosamund fed the starving blue soldiers. But when they had done so, the soldiers were as hungry as ever. Which only shows that soldiers are an ungrateful lot, and it is idle to try and make their lives better and brighter.

So then the Blue Captain, who had not had anything, even on the point of his sword, said—

“More—more, my gallant men are fainting for lack of food.”

So there was nothing for it but to bring out the candied fruits, and to feed the soldiers with them. So Fabian and Rosamund stuck bits of candied apricot and fig and pear and cherry and beetroot on the tops of the soldiers’ bayonets, and when every soldier had a piece they put a fat candied cherry on the officer’s sword. Then the children knew the soldiers would be quiet for a few minutes, and they ran back into their own house and into the library to talk to each other about what they had better do, for they both felt that the blue soldiers were a very hard-hearted set of men.

“They might shut us up in the dungeons,” said Rosamund, “and then Mother might lock us in, when she shut up the lid of the bureau, and we should starve to death.”

For they could not be sure exactly what size they were, or which library their Mother would come back to when she had given away all the flannel petticoats and things.

The dungeons were the pigeon-holes of the bureau, and the doors of them were the little “Beauties of Literature”—very heavy doors they were too.

You see the curious thing was that the children had built a town and got into it, and in it they had found their own house with the very town they had built—or one exactly like it—still on the library floor.

“I think it’s all nonsense,” said Rosamund. But when they looked out of the window there was the house with Windsor Castle and the head of Rebecca just opposite.

“If we could only find Mother,” she said; but they knew without looking that Mother was not in the house that they were in then.

“I wish we had that mouse that looked like clockwork—and the donkey, and the other box of soldiers—perhaps they are red ones, and they would fight the blue and lick them—because red-coats are English and they always win,” said Fabian.

And then Rosamund said—

“Oh, Fabe, I believe we could go into _this_ town, too, if we tried! Let us put all the things in, and then try!”

So they went to the bureau drawer, and Rosamund got out the other box of soldiers and the mouse—it _was_ a clockwork one—and the donkey with panniers, and put them in the town, while Fabian ate up a few odd raisins that had dropped on the floor.

When all the soldiers (they _were_ red) were arranged on the ramparts of the little town, Fabian said—

“I am thinking of all the raisins and things on the soldiers’ bayonets outside. It seems a pity not to eat the things for them.”

But Rosamund said—

“No, no; let’s get into this town, and perhaps we shall be safe from the blue soldiers. Oh, Fabe, never mind the raisins!”

But Fabian said, “I don’t want you to come if you’re frightened. I’ll go alone. Who’s afraid?”

So then of course Rosamund said she would come with him, so they went out and ate the things for the soldiers, leaving the Captain’s cherry for the last. And when that was eaten they ran as hard as they could back to their house and into the library, where the town was on the floor, with the little red soldiers on the ramparts.

“I’m sure we can get into this town,” cried Fabian, and sure enough they did, just as they had done into the first one. Whether they got smaller or the town got larger I leave you to decide. And it was exactly the same sort of town as the other. So now they were in a town built in a library in a house in a town built in a library in a house in a town called London—and the town they were in now had red soldiers in it and they felt quite safe, and the Union Jack was stuck up over the gateway. It was a stiff little flag they had found with some others in the bureau drawer; it was meant to be stuck in the Christmas pudding, but they had stuck it between two blocks and put it over the gate of their town. They walked about this town and found their own house, just as before, and went in, and there was the toy town on the floor; and you will see that they might have walked into that town also, but they saw that it was no good, and that they couldn’t get out that way, but would only get deeper and deeper into a nest of towns in libraries in houses in towns in libraries in houses in towns in ... and so on for always—something like Chinese puzzle-boxes multiplied by millions and millions for ever and ever. And they did not like even to think of this, because of course they would be getting further and further from home every time. And when Fabian explained all this to Rosamund she said he made her head ache, and she began to cry.

Then Fabian thumped her on the back and told her not to be a little silly, for he was a very kind brother. And he said—

“Come out and let’s see if the soldiers can tell us what to do.”

So they went out; but the red soldiers said they knew nothing but drill, and even the Red Captain said he really couldn’t advise. Then they met the clockwork mouse. He was big like an elephant, and the donkey with panniers was as big as a mastodon or a megatherium. (If they teach you anything at school of course they have taught you all about the megatherium and the mastodon.)

The Mouse kindly stopped to speak to the children, and Rosamund burst into tears again and said she wanted to go home.

The great Mouse looked down at her and said—

“I am sorry for _you_, but your brother is the kind of child that overwinds clockwork mice the very first day he has them. I prefer to stay this size.”

Then Fabian said: “On my honour, I won’t. If we get back home I’ll give you to Rosamund. That is, supposing I get you for one of my Christmas presents.”

The donkey with panniers said—

“And you won’t put coals in my panniers or unglue my feet from my green grass-plot because I look more natural without wheels?”

“I give you my word,” said Fabian, “I wouldn’t think of such a thing.”

“Very well,” said the Mouse, “then I will tell you. It is a great secret, but there is only one way to get out of this kind of town. You—I hardly know how to explain—you—you just _walk out of the gate_, you know.”

“Dear me,” said Rosamund; “I never thought of that!”

So they all went to the gate of the town and walked out, and there they were in the library again. But when they looked out of the window the All-Wool Mausoleum was still to be seen, and the terrible blue soldiers.

“What are we to do now?” asked Rosamund; but the clockwork mouse and the donkey with panniers were their proper size again now (or else the children had got bigger. It is no use asking me which, for I do not know), and so of course they could not speak.

“We must walk out of this town as we did out of the other,” said Fabian.

“Yes,” Rosamund said; “only this town if full of blue soldiers and I am afraid of them. Don’t you think it would do if we _ran_ out?”

So out they ran and down the steps that were made of the “Spectator” and the “Rambler” and the “Tatler” and the “Observer.” And directly they stood on the brown library carpet they ran to the window and looked out, and they saw—instead of the building with Windsor Castle and Rebecca’s head in it, and the All-Wool Mausoleum—they saw their own road with the trees without any leaves and the man was just going along lighting the lamps with the stick that the gas-light pops out of, like a bird, to roost in the glass cage at the top of the lamp-post. So they knew that they were safe at home again.

And as they stood looking out they heard the library door open, and Mother’s voice saying—

“What a dreadful muddle! And what have you done with the raisins and the candied fruits?” And her voice was very grave indeed.

Now you will see that it was quite impossible for Fabian and Rosamund to explain to their mother what they had done with the raisins and things, and how they had been in a town in a library in a house in a town they had built in their own library with the books and the bricks and the pretty picture blocks kind Uncle Thomas gave them. Because they were much younger than I am, and even I have found it rather hard to explain.

So Rosamund said, “Oh, Mother, my head does ache so,” and began to cry. And Fabian said nothing, but he, also, began to cry.

And Mother said, “I don’t wonder your head aches, after all those sweet things.” And she looked as if she would like to cry too.

“I don’t know what Daddy will say,” said Mother, and then she gave them each a nasty powder and put them both to bed.

“I wonder what he _will_ say,” said Fabian just before he went to sleep.

“_I_ don’t know,” said Rosamund, and, strange to say, they don’t know to this hour what Daddy said. Because next day they both had measles, and when they got better every one had forgotten about what had happened on Christmas Eve. And Fabian and Rosamund had forgotten just as much as everybody else. So I should never have heard of it but for the clockwork mouse. It was he who told me the story, just as the children told it to him in the town in the library in the house in the town they built in their own library with the books and the bricks and the pretty picture blocks which were given to them by kind Uncle Thomas. And if you do not believe the story it is not my fault: I believe every word the mouse said, for I know the good character of that clockwork mouse, and I know it could not tell an untruth even if it tried.

_THE PLUSH USURPER_

THERE was a knock at the King’s study door. The King looked up from his plans for the new municipal washhouses and sighed; for that was the twenty-seventh knock that had come to his door since breakfast.

“Come in,” said the King, wearily.

And the Lord Chief Good-doer came in. He wore a white gown and carried a white wand. If you had been there you would have noticed how clean the King’s study looked. All the books were bound in white vellum, and the floor was covered with white matting, and the window curtains were of white silk. Of course, it would not be right for every one to have such things, even if we were all kings because it would make such a lot of work for the servants. But this king, whose name was Alban, had an excellent housekeeper. She did all the cooking and cleaned everything by white magic, which is better even than _nettoyage-à-sec_ (if you know what that is), and only took the good lady five minutes every morning.

“I am extremely sorry to disturb your Majesty,” said the Lord Chief Good-doer, “but your Majesty’s long-lost brother Negretti has called in from the Golden Indies, and he says he can’t stay more than half an hour.”

The King jumped up, knocking over the white wood table where the White Books were. (We call them Blue Books in England, but the insides are just as dull whatever colour you put outside.)

“My dear brother! I haven’t seen him since we were boys together,” he cried, and ran out to meet him, tucking up his royal white velvet robes to run the quicker down the cool marble corridors.

At the front door of the Palace was the King’s brother just getting off his elephant. He was a brown and yellow brother, withered and shrivelled like a very old apple, and dressed in a suite of plush of a bright orange, sown thick with emeralds. All the white marble terrace in front of the Palace was crowded with the retinue of the new arrival. Slaves of all colours—black, brown, yellow, and cream colour, dressed in all sorts of bright hues, scarlet and blue and purple and orange, with rubies and sapphires and amethysts and topazes sewn thickly on them, so that the eye could hardly bear the glow and glitter of them as they shone in the sunlight on the terrace.

“Welcome, welcome!” King Alban cried, and kissed his brother on both cheeks, as is the fashion in Albanatolia and in many other civilised lands. Then, still holding him by both hands, he led him into the Palace. The jewelled gorgeous retinue followed him in, and the head parlour-maid shut the front door and put the chain up, because she knew it to be more than possible that a few odd rubies and sapphires and things would drop off the retinue on to the floor, and she thought any such little odds and ends might as well go into her dust-pan, when she swept up after lunch, as into the pockets of any poor people who might look in during the afternoon to ask the King’s advice, as they were fond of doing. This was the beginning of the trouble that was wrought by the coming of the King’s brother. Before this every door stood unfastened all day long, because every one was contented, and therefore honest.

King Alban entertained his brother royally for seven days in the good old fashion, and then gave him a palace of his own to live in. The Palace was of white marble, like most of the buildings in Albanatolia, but the King’s brother had it painted red all over without a moment’s delay. And then he began to give parties and to have processions and to scatter money among the crowd, and every day the people loved him more. He was a loud, jolly, joking sort of man, with a black beard, and he always wore clothes of plush, a material hitherto unknown; and he always blazed with jewels, and he had a circus set up at his own expense in the field at the back of his Palace; and he introduced horse-racing and animated photographs—all highly coloured—and thus became extraordinarily popular: so much so that the people presently began to forget all the good that King Alban had done for them, and to wish secretly that the kingdom had happened to have a bright, cheerful king like Prince Negretti.

For King Alban had worked so hard for his people’s good that he had not had time to be amusing. He had never had processions and circuses, preferring rather small tea-parties with the Lord Chief Good-doer, the Commissioner of Public Health, and a few chosen spirits from the Education Department, and loving best of all to wander alone, dreaming, among the blossoming orchards or in the meadows beyond the river, where the white jonquils grew, or in the lanes between the pearly may-bushes, or in the terraced garden of his Palace, where the white roses hung in heavy-scented clusters, and the white peacocks spread their tails upon the marble balustrades. And wherever he went he thought of the people’s good, and devised new ways of making them comfortable. Everything was beautifully managed. Every one had enough to wear and enough to eat, and enough to do, which is very important; but they had not enough to play at, and this was what made them ready to lend long and discontented ears to the whispers of the King’s brother.

Now Negretti was a Magician, and his was the black or coloured magic which won’t wash clothes. He was always messing about with acids and alkalis, and sulphites and bicarbonates, and retorts and furnaces, and test-tubes, and pestles and mortars, and the like; and whenever he happened to make a nice colour by mixing two or more of these things together, he always put it in a bottle and stuck it up in one of the Palace windows, so that at night his windows were brighter than any chemist’s and druggist’s in any street, and the people said it was as good as fireworks. The King’s palace windows only sent out a soft white light like moonlight, and this was now considered very tame.

It was the Magician’s habit to wander about the town stirring up discontent as easily as if it had been one of his chemical messes; and though he was so well known among the people he was never recognised, because he always took care to disguise himself as a respectable person, and the disguise was quite impenetrable. (I hope you know what that is?)

One night he sat disguised at the King’s Head—the finest of the municipal alehouses—drinking dog’s-nose out of a pewter-pot, and the grumbling of the people was music in his wicked ears.

“Alban is not my sort of king,” said the blacksmith.

“I’d make a better king out of a penn’orth of putty any day of the week,” said the painter.

“What’s the good of a king if you never see him?” said the landlady.

“No processions, no flags, no gilt coaches, no rubies and diamonds and sapphires, no royal robes of purple and gold—such as a loyal country has a right to expect on its sovereign’s back! Only that old white thing,” said the barmaid.

“No better than a velvet nightgown,” said the landlady.

“I like a bit of colour, I do,” said the painter. “Graining I don’t ask for, for he’s not had the education to know its beauty; but a good warm maroon, or a royal blue, now! But, no; it’s white, white, white, till I’m sick of it. And us all wearing white by law, and washing done free, by white magic, at the Palace, on Mondays from 10 to 4. And no one to have more than a quart of beer of an evening! I tell you what it is, my boys, we’re miserable, degraded slaves; that’s what we are!”

“If we must have a king,” said the blacksmith, “why not good old Negretti? He’s something like a king, he is! Ah! if he only knew how our free hearts beat with him, he’d be sitting on the throne to-morrow.”

Then Negretti threw off his disguise—the pewter with the municipal arms on it rolled on the sanded floor, and spilt what was left of the dog’s-nose on to the disguise—and the Magician stood before them, pale but firm, his dark lantern in his hand. It was a magic lantern, of course.

“Down-trodden slaves!” he cried, “poor benighted, oppressed people! Follow me! Let us dethrone a king who seeks to mask tyranny with hypocritical public kitchens, and cloaks his infamous autocracy with free washing by white magic on a Monday! To the Palace, to the Palace!”

And they all finished up their beer and followed him, and half the town beside joined the throng as it pressed through the streets towards the Eastern gate, beyond which was the King’s Palace.

Now while the Magician was drinking his dog’s-nose, disguised as a respectable person, the King in his white robes was walking under the boughs of the white-blossomed pear-trees, for it was spring, and the moon was at the full. And presently, coming along over the dewy grey grass of the orchard, he saw a figure in white, and when it came close to him he saw that it was a lady more fair than the fair stars of that fair night.

“And who are you?” said the King.

“I am a poor Princess seeking my fortune,” said she.

“You will rest under my roof to-night,” said the King, and led her through the long sweet grass under the blossoming boughs to the Palace garden. When they came to the terrace the Princess loosed a lantern from her girdle, set it on the stone balustrade close by where one of the white peacocks perched in fluffy feathery slumber, kindled it, and threw open the horn door. A flood of light streamed out, bright as spring sunshine, and fell full upon her, and then the King saw that her gown was not white, as it had seemed in the moonlight, but was the colour of yellow gold, and her hair was red gold, and her eyes were of gold and grey mingled. Then for the first time in all his life the King thought of himself and of his own happiness, and he caught her hands and said—

“Nothing will ever again content me, not even doing good to my people, if I must part from you. Will you stay and be my Queen?”

The Princess said, “I am seeking my fortune. Do you think you are it?”

“I do not know, my dear,” said the King, “whether I am your fortune, but I know well enough that _you_ are _mine_!”

Then the Princess clapped her hands and said, “That is the right answer! I have travelled half round the world to hear it; and will you love me always?”

“Always, my Queen,” said he, “exactly the same as you will love me. We are not of the race that changes heart.”

So then they kissed each other as lovers should, and wandered along the yew-tree avenue deep in lovers’ talk, and never even heard the crowd that the Magician had brought to the front door. So when the crowd found that the Palace door was locked for the night it went home again, but it came back in the morning with trumpets and banners and scraps of coloured stuff tied over its white clothing, and the King went out to meet it.

When the crowd saw him every one began to shout: “Down with Alban!” “Down with the White King!” “Free Beer!” “No more washing!” and things like that.

Then the King stood forth and said—

“What have I done but seek for your good? When, till now, have I thought of my own happiness? Who has stirred you up to these ill thoughts of me? My people, my own beloved people, have my ears ever been closed to your complaints? Have you wrongs? Tell me, and I will right them. Have you sorrows? Make them known and let me soothe them. Do you not know that your King is your servant, and lives but to do you good?”

And the crowd grumbled and muttered, and one voice cried—

“We don’t want to be done good to. We want to enjoy ourselves.”

“I did not know,” said the King, gently. “But now you have spoken I will at once appoint a Minister of Public Enjoyment, and——”

The Magician was watching the crowd, and he saw how the sight of the King’s good face and the sound of his good voice were working on their hearts that had once loved him. Now Negretti sprang forward. “One word, brother!” he cried, and led the King into the shadow of a close-clipped yew-tree walk. The moment they were hidden he caught his brother’s arm and whispered a wicked spell: and the first words of it were in Persian, and the next in Greek, and after that came words in Arabic and Spanish, and the speech of the county of Essex, and the last words of all were “be changed to a stone.”

And so strong was the spell that the King was turned to a stone that very minute—a great white stone—and fell under the yew hedge, and lay there.

Then the Magician said “Ha, ha!” and, after waiting so long as he deemed prudent, he went back to the people, and said—

“I regret to inform you that your King has proved quite unreliable as a man of business. When I urged him to sign a written agreement to keep you always in a good humour he refused, and then he remembered an urgent appointment in Nova Scotia; and he has gone, and taken most of the crown treasure with him. But, do not despair, I will be your King, and I have an income quite sufficient to keep up a small establishment of my own. And my golden argosies are now on the way from the Indies, bearing all manner of precious things, and bales of plush are on their way from Yorkshire. So now I am King.”

The people believed him, for they had never known a King who spoke anything but the truth. So they shouted, “Long live the King!” and the matter was settled. That very day Negretti had the Palace painted magenta, and covered all the window-sashes and mantelpieces with gold paint, and stuck embossed coloured scraps on them.

Then he went out into the garden to get a good look at his magenta Palace from the outside, and as he went along the clipped-yew walk there was the Princess Perihelia weeping over the white stone.

“What are you crying for?” he asked.

“I’m crying for the White King,” said she.

“And why do you cry _here_?” said the Magician.

“I don’t know,” said the poor Princess, and she looked so beautiful that the Magician went straight into the Palace and told the Prime Tailor to sew new rubies all over his new purple plush suit because he was going a-courting.

The very next day Negretti put on the purple plush suit as well as the Royal Crown, and went to the wing of the Palace which the White King had set apart for the Princess Perihelia to live in. Alban’s crown was made of silver and pearls and moonstones, and the new King had ordered a new crown, all gold, and stuck as full of rubies and emeralds and sapphires as a really good Christmas cake is of plums. (I do not mean the cake they call “good, wholesome school cake,” but the kind they have at home when there is a party.) He took all his many-coloured retinue with him, and they waited on the terrace while the Magician knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said the Princess.

“I’ve come to marry you,” said the Magician, coming to the point at once; for he had arranged to have a procession that afternoon, and he was a little pressed for time.

But Perihelia said, “No, thank you.”

The Magician could hardly believe his ears. “But you’ll be Queen of the land,” said he, “and that’s what you’d have been if you’d married my brother, and, I suppose, what you wanted to be.”

“O no, it isn’t,” said she.

“Well, what did you want?” said he.

“I wanted to be the White King’s wife,” said she.

“It’s the same thing,” he said.

But she said: “No, it isn’t, not a bit.” And it was in vain that he showed her his best plush suit and the plush suits of his retainers; she simply wouldn’t look at them, nor at the precious stones either; so at last he went off to his Palace to make more rubies and precious stones and things like that, and she went off to cry over the white stone.

Now a lot of tell-tale-tits had built their nests above the Palace, and some of them flew off and told the Magician how Perihelia was always crying in the yew avenue over the white stone. So he said to his slaves: “Get a hand-cart, and carry the thing on to the middle of the bridge and drop it into the river.” So they did, and the stone stuck, end-up, in the mud; and when the golden argosies of the Magician came up the river, bearing peacocks and apes and turquoises, every single galley split on that stone, and the whole treasure went to the bottom; all but the peacocks, and they flew away into the country of a neighbouring King, who thought every one should be useful and not ornamental; so he cut off the peacocks tails, and clipped their wings, and tried to teach them to lay turkey’s eggs. But it is very difficult to get a peacock to do anything useful.

So then the Magician set a lot of people dredging for the lost treasure; and, among other things, they fished up some poor dead apes and the big white stone, and as the stone seemed to have been rather in the way in the bed of the river, they carted it away to the fields behind the town, where the white jonquils grew, and dumped it down there, and left it among the long grass.

And the Princess could not come and cry over it there because she did not know where it was, and besides she was very busy; for, after she had refused to marry him, the Magician said, “Very well, then, you can just do the free washing;” for the royal housekeeper had given five minutes’ notice, and left at the end of it, as soon as the new King had the Palace painted magenta, and no one else knew how to do washing by white magic, and though the people had sneered at it in the White King’s time they stood out for it now, and said free washing was what they had always been accustomed to. Poor Perihelia did not know the white magic; but she washed by the Sunlight Magic, and everything she sent home from the wash was pinky or pearly or greeny, like the little clouds in a May dawn. The people were pleased, but not the Magician.

“I like a colour to _be_ a colour,” he said. “I hate your half measures.”

He was beginning to remodel the kingdom to his own fancy. Instead of a Lord Chief Good-doer he had a Lord Chief Magician, and instead of the Education Department he had a Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic, and he shut up the free washhouses. “Who wants to wash?” said he, and he ordered a free distribution of nasty medicine instead; and altogether he was really beginning to enjoy himself when another tell-tale-tit came fluttering in at the window of his laboratory, and, perching on the top of a crucible, told him of a Rumour. The Rumour had been running about the town like a mad thing, and wherever it ran it left its tail behind it. Rumour, as you know, is a beast with many tales; and now everybody knew that the white stone had moved in the night and had come rolling up to the gate of the town.

“Whatever shall we do?” said the Lord Chief Magician, who was pounding up nasty things in the mortar ready for the free distribution of medicine next day.

“Smash it,” said Negretti. “I’ll take a turn at the medicine while you go and see the thing done.”

So the Lord Chief Magician called together the Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic and sent them to break the stone. And when they began to hit it with their hammers and picks seventeen sharp splinters of white stone flew off, and each splinter hit a member of the Committee in the eye and killed him. There were exactly seventeen members, as it happened. So then the Lord Chief Magician shut the town gates and ran home and hid under the bed.

And the people of the town were very much interested in the stone that had rolled by itself and had killed seventeen members of the Committee, and they made little parties and picnics all day long, taking their children to look at the stone and carrying sandwiches with them and bottles of beer.

The Magician was very angry.

“Such rubbish I never heard of,” said he when the tell-tale-tit alighted on the window-sill and told him of it. “If they want to look at anything, why can’t they come and look at _me_? I’m sure I’m coloured enough!”

That night the stone rose up in the thickest of the black dark, when no one at all is out of doors, except the Police—and not always him—and it smashed through the town gate and came rolling right up into the Square and lay there.

The tell-tale-tit awoke the Magician in the morning by singing the news sharply in his ear, and he went out to see. There was a great crowd in the Square, and they all cried out—

“It is a magic stone. It will bring us luck. Build it into the royal Palace.”

“I might do worse,” thought Negretti. “If good Roman cement and a double coat of magenta paint doesn’t keep it quiet nothing will.”

So he gave orders, and the stone was carted to the Palace, and built into the wall over the great gate; and while they were gone to fetch the red paint to cover up the stone and the mortar the Lord Chief Magician came out from under his bed, and went sneaking up to the Palace and in at the gate, and the stone fell on him and smashed him quite flat.

Then Perihelia came running out, and she washed the mortar off the white stone by her Sunlight Magic; and when the Magician come out she said: “Let it lie here to-night, and to-morrow, if you will let me go, I will take it away to my own kingdom, so that it shall never trouble you again.”

Negretti agreed, because he did not know what else to do, and he was beginning to despair of the Princess ever marrying him, because he had now asked her to do so every day for a month, and always with more display of plush and jewels, and she said “No” more decidedly, and even crossly, every time. So he began to lose heart.

That night, just when the moon was waning, and before morning broke, Princess Perihelia slipped down the Palace stairs and into the garden to look once more on the place where the White King had promised to love her always.

And when she came to that same place there was the white stone lying under the shadow of the white rose bushes, and pearly rose leaves had fallen all over it, and were falling still, like tears.

Perihelia knelt down beside the stone and put her arms round it, and said—

“Poor stone, dear stone, what is it that troubles you so that you cannot rest? If I only knew, I might help you with my Sunlight Magic. Why are you so troubled, and why do I pity you so? Oh, if my White King were here he would understand and help you! But I can do nothing!”

With that she began to weep over the stone, calling on the White King to come back to her. And all the while she was talking and weeping the moon was waning and the light in the East grew pearlier and prettier minute by minute. And as she wept and clasped the stone she presently saw in the glowing light that the stone was changing in her arms. Like white sands falling in an hour-glass, the white stone fell away and fell away until the sun looked through the white rose bushes and saw Perihelia clasp the living form of the White King in her loving arms.

The sun’s was not the only eye which saw that meeting. The Magician had had a bad night, and he came out early, curious to see whether the stone had moved again. His curiosity was gratified.

When the White King saw his treacherous brother his tongue was loosed—hitherto kisses had been speech enough for him—and he spoke the words which he found in his mouth. And they were, naturally enough, the last words that had gone in at his ears, and the words were first Persian and then Greek, and then Arabic and Spanish, and the language of foreigners from Essex; and the words he wound up with were, “be changed into a stone.”

But the wicked spell that had turned King Alban into a stone had grown weaker by keeping (as even ’20 port did when it was kept too long), and it had no longer power to do what it ought to have done. It could not turn the wicked Magician into a stone, as I am sure you would wish it to have done; it was only strong enough to turn him into a wooden post.

* * * * *

I do not wish to have to mention such an unpleasant character as Negretti again, so I will tell you at once the end of him. He remained a post for ever and ever, and later on, when King Alban had begun to do things for his people’s good again, he thought it a pity to waste even a post, for he was ever a careful King. So he had it made into a pump, and the water from it was bitter and nasty, like the medicine the Magician used to give the people; and it was very good for children, and gave them a nice bright colour in their cheeks. Take care you do not grow pale, or you may have to drink the water out of that pump. It is now at Harrogate, or Epsom, or Bath, or somewhere, and you might quite easily be taken there and made to drink that unpleasant water. The first persons who had to drink it were the Magician’s retinue. The King thought it would be good for them, and they were very grateful; but the next night they stole the State barge, and went home by sea to their own country.

Among his other improvements, the King started municipal omnibuses, which were white and gold. But the pump being near the place where the omnibuses changed horses the conductors used to take the bitter water to wash the omnibuses with, and gradually they became scarlet and blue and green and violet, just as you see them to-day. So now you know the reason of the colour of omnibuses. And this is the end of the Magician’s part of the story.

* * * * *

When the Magician had been turned into a post, the King said—

“I’m very sorry;” but the Princess said—

“Dear, he deserved it. And being a post is not painful. Let us never think of him again. I have learned many things since I came here. I have something to break to you. Do you think you can bear it?”

“I can bear anything now,” said he, holding her in his arms, and kissing her again, because she was so very dear.

“Well,” said Perihelia, “I am Princess of the Sun, and if I marry you, my own dear King, I shan’t be able to help colouring your pretty white kingdom a little. Just soft sweet colours, dear, and not an inch of plush. We’ll make a law against _that_ the very first thing. And you shall go on teaching your people to be good, and I’ll try to teach them to be happy. Do you think I can?”

The White King smiled. “You’ve taught _me_,” he said; “but now, before we do anything for the people, let’s go and get married, and we can begin to make the new laws directly we’ve finished breakfast. We shall just have time to be married if we go off to church at once.”

So they went off, and woke up the Archbishop, and were married, and the Archbishop came home with them to breakfast, and afterwards they began to make laws as hard as they could.

The first law was “There is to be no Plush at all in this kingdom.” And now Albanatolia is the most beautiful country in the world, all soft sweet colours and clear pearly white; and the Queen Perihelia has taught the people how to be happy, so the King has very little work to do, for they are good almost without his interfering at all. It is a lovely country. I hope you will go there some day. I went there once but they would not let me stay because I had a black coat on, and gaiters; and the sight of these clothes made the people so unhappy that the Queen asked me as a private and personal favour to go away, and never to come back unless I could come dressed in something like the colours of the clouds at dawn. I have never been able to manage this, and, anyway, I don’t suppose I could find the way there now. But, if you could get the proper dress, perhaps you could?

THE END

_Printed in Great Britain by
Neill & Co. Limited
Edinburgh_

* * * * *

Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious punctuation errors repaired. Repeated story titles were deleted in this plain text version.

Page 88, “an” changed to “ran” (ran up a signal-box)

Page 227, “hersel” changed to “herself” (fairy drew herself up)

Page 258, “or” changed to “for” (for lack of food)

Page 258, “brng” changed to “bring” (but to bring out)