'What! Like the people in Robin's fairy-book?' said little Dolly.

'Yes: who always got whatever they wished for, directly they put the goloshes on. I should like to jump back into the Middle Ages, like the old Professor.'

'But you know, Silvia,' Robin remarked, with a very sagacious look in his round brown eyes: 'you know how much the Professor hated the Middle Ages when he got into them.'

'That,' rejoined Silvia, 'was because he managed so badly. He didn't know he was in the Middle Ages at all. I should know where I was, and not be surprised at everything looking different and odd. I should keep wishing myself first in one century and then in another, I think——'

'Yes. And only imagine,' said Sydney, 'how Queen Elizabeth would open her eyes when you told her about railways, and the penny post, and balloons, and photographs, and velocipedes!'

'Oh, Syd, I wish you wouldn't! As if I should tell her anything about those stupid things! Of course I shouldn't talk about what wasn't invented—then-a-days,' finished Silvia, after pausing in vain for a suitable expression.

'Well, do you know,' announced Robin, putting his hands in his pockets, and nodding his head emphatically, 'I think the "goloshes of fortune" would be awfully wasted on you two. Such stupid things to wish! I know what would be much jollier than journeying back into the Middle Ages among all those ridiculous people in Mangnall; or going to places where one never can find their latitude or longitude.'

'My dear Robin,' cried Christie, 'your grammar is getting perfectly wild.'

'Pooh! Bother grammar. Because Christie happens to be twelve, she is always setting-up to be as clever as Miss Gregory. As if one could worry one's self about grammar out of school hours. Now, Silvia, I'll tell you where I'd go if I had those goloshes: I'd go right into fairy-land, and see all the people in the Arabian Nights and the Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hans Andersen's stories. They would be much better worth seeing than your Sir Walter Raleighs and Horatiuses and Syd's savages. I shouldn't care to see real people; they would put me so in mind of Mangnall.'

'I don't much like Mangnall,' Silvia confessed. 'But I tell you what: it would be rather nice to be put into it one's self when one is grown up. I mean to write books some day; and then, perhaps, I might be put into the British Biographies!'