"Gold, please--and millions of it"--

"This gravel-pit full be enough?" said the Fairy in an off-hand manner.

"Oh _yes_"--

"Then go out before I begin, or you'll be buried alive in it."

It made its skinny arms so long, and waved them so frighteningly, that
the children ran as hard as they could towards the road by which carts
used to come to the gravel-pits. Only Anthea had presence of mind enough
to shout a timid "Good-morning, I hope your whisker will be better
to-morrow," as she ran.

On the road they turned and looked back, and they had to shut their
eyes, and open them very slowly, a little bit at a time, because the
sight was too dazzling for their eyes to be able to bear. It was
something like trying to look at the sun at high noon on Midsummer Day.
For the whole of the sand-pit was full, right up to the very top, with
new shining gold pieces, and all the little bank-martins' little front
doors were covered out of sight. Where the road for carts wound into the
gravel-pit the gold lay in heaps like stones lie by the roadside, and a
great bank of shining gold shelved down from where it lay flat and
smooth between the tall sides of the gravel-pit. And all the gleaming
heaps was minted gold. And on the sides and edges of these countless
coins the mid-day sun shone and sparkled, and glowed and gleamed till
the quarry looked like the mouth of a smelting furnace, or one of the
fairy halls that you see sometimes in the sky at sunset.