weren't so gold-fishy as you two were, so we got changed quicker, and
we've had time to think it over, and if you ask me"--

"I didn't ask you," said Jane, biting off a needleful of thread as she
had always been strictly forbidden to do. (Perhaps you don't know that
if you bite off ends of cotton and swallow them they wind tight round
your heart and kill you? My nurse told me this, and she told me also
about the earth going round the sun. Now what is one to believe--what
with nurses and science?)

"I don't care who asks or who doesn't," said Robert, "but Anthea and I
think the Sammyadd is a spiteful brute. If it can give us our wishes I
suppose it can give itself its own, and I feel almost sure it wishes
every time that our wishes shan't do us any good. Let's let the tiresome
beast alone, and just go and have a jolly good game of forts, on our
own, in the chalk-pit."

(You will remember that the happily-situated house where these children
were spending their holidays lay between a chalk-quarry and a
gravel-pit.)

Cyril and Jane were more hopeful--they generally were.

"I don't think the Sammyadd does it on purpose," Cyril said; "and, after
all, it _was_ silly to wish for boundless wealth. Fifty pounds in
two-shilling pieces would have been much more sensible. And wishing to
be beautiful as the day was simply donkeyish. I don't want to be
disagreeable, but it _was_. We must try to find a really useful wish,
and wish it."