They had no indiarubber, and if you drew anything wrong it had to stay drawn. When you first begin to draw, you draw a good many things wrong, don’t you? I assure you that nobody would have known that the black and grey muddle on Elfrida’s paper was meant to be a picture of a castle. Edred’s was much more easily recognised, even before he printed “Arden Castle” under it in large, uneven letters. He never once raised his eyes from his paper, and just drew what he thought the front of the castle looked like from the outside. Also he sucked his pencil earnestly—Elfrida’s pencil, I mean—and this made the lines of his drawing very black.
“There!” he said at last, “it’s ever so much liker than yours.”
“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but there’s more in mine.”
“It doesn’t matter how much there is in a picture if you can’t tell what it’s meant for,” said Edred, with some truth. “Now, in mine you can see the towers, and the big gate, and the windows, and the twiddly in-and-outness on top.”
“Yes,” said Elfrida, “but . . . well, let’s do something else. I don’t believe we should either of us learn to draw well enough to rebuild Arden by; not before we’ve found the treasure, I mean. Perhaps we might meet a real artist, like the one we saw drawing the castle yesterday—in the past I mean—and get him to draw it for us, and bring the picture back with us, and——”
“Oh,” cried Edred, jumping up and dropping his masterpiece, and the calf-bound volume and the pencil. “I know. The Brownie!”
“The Brownie?”
“Yes—take it with us. Then we could photograph the castle all perfect.”
“But we can’t take it with us.”
“Can’t we?” said Edred; “that’s all you know. Now I’ll tell you something. That first time—a bit of plaster was in my shoe when we changed, and it was in my shoe when we got there, and I took it out when we were learning about ‘dog’s delight.’ And I flipped it out of the window. And when we got back, and I’d changed and everything, there was that bit of plaster in my own shoe. If we can take plaster we can take photographs—cameras, I mean.” This close and intelligent reasoning commanded Elfrida’s respect, and she wished she had thought of it herself. But then she had not had any plaster in her shoe. So she said—