l wanted to dig out a cave to play smugglers in, but the others
thought it might bury them alive, so it ended in all spades going to
work to dig a hole through the castle to Australia. These children, you
see, believed that the world was round, and that on the other side the
little Australian boys and girls were really walking wrong way up, like
flies on the ceiling, with their heads hanging down into the air.

The children dug and they dug and they dug, and their hands got sandy
and hot and red, and their faces got damp and shiny. The Lamb had tried
to eat the sand, and had cried so hard when he found that it was not,
as he had supposed, brown sugar, that he was now tired out, and was
lying asleep in a warm fat bunch in the middle of the half-finished
castle. This left his brothers and sisters free to work really hard, and
the hole that was to come out in Australia soon grew so deep that Jane,
who was called Pussy for short, begged the others to stop.

"Suppose the bottom of the hole gave way suddenly," said she, "and you
tumbled out among the little Australians, all the sand would get in
their eyes."

"Yes," said Robert; "and they would hate us, and throw stones at us, and
not let us see the kangaroos, or opossums, or bluegums, or Emu Brand
birds, or anything."

Cyril and Anthea knew that Australia was not quite so near as all that,
but they agreed to stop using the spades and to go on with their hands.
This was quite easy, because the sand at the bottom of the hole was very
soft and fine and dry, like sea-sand. And there were little shells in
it.

"Fancy it having been wet sea here once, all sloppy and shiny," said
Jane, "with fishes and conger-eels and coral and mermaids."

"And masts of ships and wrecked Spanish treasure. I wish we could find a
gold doubloon, or something," Cyril said.

"How did the sea get carried away?" Robert asked.

"Not in a pail, silly," said his brother.

"Father says the earth got too hot underneath, as you do in bed
sometimes, so it just hunched up its shoulders, and the sea had to slip
off, like the blankets do us, and the shoulder was left sticking out,
and turned into dry land. Let's go and look for shells; I think that
little cave looks likely, and I see something sticking out there like a
bit of wrecked ship's anchor, and it's beastly hot in the Australian
hole."

The others agreed, but Anthea went on digging. She always liked to
finish a thing when she had once begun it.