reach the ground," Dickie told himself, "and then I
shall know it's all only a dream, a silly dream."

But he never reached the ground. He had not fallen a couple of yards
before he was caught by something soft as heaped feathers or drifted
snow; it moved and shifted under him, took shape; it was a chair--no, a
carriage. And there were reins in his hand--white reins. And a horse?
No--a swan with wide, white wings. He grasped the reins and guided the
strange steed to a low swoop that should bring him near the flare of
torches in the street, outside the great front door. And as the swan
laid its long neck low in downward flight he saw his cousins in a
carriage like his own rise into the sky and sail away towards the south.
Quite without meaning to do it he pulled on the reins; the swan rose. He
pulled again and the carriage stopped at the landing window.

Hands dragged him in. The old nurse's hands. The swan glided away
between snow and stars, and on the landing inside the open window the
nurse held him fast in her arms.

"My lamb!" she said; "my dear, foolish, brave lamb!"

Dickie was pulling himself together.

"If it's a dream," he said slowly, "I've had enough. I want to wake up.
If it's real--real, with magic in it--you've got to explain it all to
me--every bit. I can't go on like this. It's not fair."

"Oh, tell him and have done," said the voice that had begun all the
magic, and it seemed to him that something small and white slid along
the wainscot of the corridor and vanished quite suddenly, just as a
candle flame does when you blow the candle out.

"I will," said the nurse. "Come, love, I _will_ tell you everything."
She took him down into a warm curtained room, blew to flame the gray
ashes on the open hearth, gave him elder wine to drink, hot and spiced,
and kneeling before him, rubbing his cold, bare feet, she told him.

"There are certain children born now and then--it does not often happen,
but now and then it does--children who are not bound by time as other
people are. And if the right bit of magic comes their way, those
children have the power to go back and forth in time just as other
children go back and forth in space--the space of a room, a
playing-field, or a garden alley. Often children lose this power when
they are quite young. Sometimes it comes to them gradually so that they
hardly know when it begins, and leaves them as gradually, like a dream
when you wake and stretch yourself. Sometimes