The butler gave an enormous yawn.
‘Cleaning up time,’ he said, and took a mop from behind the door, and dipped it into the pool of curds and whey. When it was quite soaked, he twisted it rapidly round and round, and a shower of curds and whey deluged David. As it fell on him, it seemed to turn to snow. It was snowing heavily from the roof too, and snow was blowing in through the door. Then he saw that it wasn’t a door at all, but the opening of a street, and that the walls were the walls of houses. It was difficult to see distinctly through the snowstorm, but he felt as if he knew where he was.
CHAPTER III
The snow cleared as swiftly as it had begun, and David saw that he was standing in the High Street of the village near which he lived. It was all quite ordinary, and he was afraid that he had somehow been popped back through the blue door during the snowstorm, and was again in the stupid dull world. Just opposite him was the post and telegraph office, and next to that the bank, and beyond that the girls’ school. There were the same old shops too, Mr. Winfall the tailor’s, and the confectioner’s and the bootmaker’s, and at the bottom of the street was the bridge over the river.
‘Well, if I am back in the world again,’ said David, ‘it would be a pity to let all this good snow go to waste without its being tobogganed on. I’ll go home, I think, and get my toboggan. I wonder how they did it.’
He started to go down the street to the bridge across which was the lane which presently passed by the bottom of the field beyond the lake, on the other side of which was the garden, where was the summer-house in which he had left his toboggan yesterday. But he happened to look a little more closely at the bootmaker’s shop, and instead of the card in the window which said, ‘Boots and shoes neatly repaired,’ there was another one on which was written ‘Uncles and Aunts recovered and repaired.’
‘I suppose they recover them when they’re lost, and repair them when they’re found,’ thought David. ‘But it’s not a bit usual.’
He found it no more usual when he looked at the girls’ school, for instead of the brass plate on which was written ‘Miss Milligan’s school for Young Ladies,’ he saw written there ‘Happy Families’ Institute,’ and in the window of the bank a notice ‘Sovereigns are cheap to-day.’
‘I’ll go in there at once,’ thought David, ‘and buy some. I wonder how much money I’ve got.’