12. The Sorry-Present and the Expelled Little Boy
13. The Shipwreck on the Tin Islands
14. The Heart's Desire




CHAPTER 1

THE PSAMMEAD

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in
a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit.
One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a
strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail's eyes,
and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears
like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's
and covered with thick soft fur--and it had hands and feet like a
monkey's. It told the children--whose names were Cyril, Robert,
Anthea, and Jane--that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy.
(Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its
birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it
had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still
kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its
power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies
have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and
Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never
could think of just the right things to wish for, and their
wishes sometimes turned out very oddly indeed. In the end their
unwise wishings landed them in what Robert called 'a very tight