to dig very fast with its furry hands.

'Oh, don't go!' they all cried; 'tell us more about it when it was
Megatheriums for breakfast! Was the world like this then?'

It stopped digging.

'Not a bit,' it said; 'it was nearly all sand where I lived, and
coal grew on trees, and the periwinkles were as big as tea-trays -
you find them now; they're turned into stone. We sand-fairies used
to live on the seashore, and the children used to come with their
little flint-spades and flint-pails and make castles for us to live
in. That's thousands of years ago, but I hear that children still
build castles on the sand. It's difficult to break yourself of a
habit.'

'But why did you stop living in the castles?' asked Robert.

'It's a sad story,' said the Psammead gloomily. 'It was because
they WOULD build moats to the castles, and the nasty wet bubbling
sea used to come in, and of course as soon as a sand-fairy got wet
it caught cold, and generally died. And so there got to be fewer
and fewer, and, whenever you found a fairy and had a wish, you used
to wish for a Megatherium, and eat twice as much as you wanted,
because it might be weeks before you got another wish.'

'And did YOU get wet?' Robert inquired.

The Sand-fairy shuddered. 'Only once,' it said; 'the end of the
twelfth hair of my top left whisker - I feel the place still in