s.

'So if we get a tanner and set it on a plate and squint at it it'll get
bigger--but so'll the plate. And we don't want to litter the place up
with plates the bigness of cartwheels. But if the plate didn't get big
we could look at the tanner till it covered the plate, and then go on
looking and looking and looking and see nothing but the tanner till it
was as big as a circus. See?'

This time Edward did see. But they got no further, because it was time
to go to the circus. There was a circus at Dymchurch just then, and that
was what made Gustus think of the sixpence growing to that size.

It was a very nice circus, and all the boys from the camp went to
it--also Edward, who managed to scramble over and wriggle under benches
till he was sitting near his friend.

[Illustration: Far above him and every one else towered the elephant.]

It was the size of the elephant that did it. Edward had not seen an
elephant before, and when he saw it, instead of saying, 'What a size he
is!' as everybody else did, he said to himself, 'What a size I could
make him!' and pulled out the spy-glass, and by a miracle of good luck
or bad got it levelled at the elephant as it went by. He turned the
glass slowly--as it went out--and the elephant only just got out in
time. Another moment and it would have been too big to get through the
door. The audience cheered madly. They thought it was a clever trick;
and so it would have been, very clever.

'You silly cuckoo,' said Gustus, bitterly, 'now you've turned that
great thing loose on the country, and how's his keeper to manage him?'

'I could make the keeper big, too.'

'Then if I was you I should just bunk out and do it.'

Edward obeyed, slipped under the canvas of the circus tent, and found
himself on the yellow, trampled grass of the field among guy-ropes,
orange-peel, banana-skins, and dirty paper. Far above him and every one
else towered the elephant--it was now as big as the church.

Edward pointed the glass at the man who was patting the elephant's
foot--that was as far up as he could reach--and telling it to 'Come down
with you!' He was very much frightened. He did not know whether you
could be put in prison for making an elephant's keeper about forty times
his proper size. But he felt that something must be done to control the
gigantic mountain of black-lead-coloured living flesh. So he looked at
the keeper through the spy-glass, and the keeper remained his normal
size!

In