nto the sea, and the
point of the rock went into a hole that just fitted it in the stony sea
bottom, and there it spun around the wrong way seven times and then lay
still. And that round piece of land became, after millions of years, the
Kingdom of Rotundia.

This is the end of the geography lesson. And now for just a little
natural history, so that we may not feel that we are quite wasting our
time. Of course, the consequence of the island having spun around the
wrong way was that when the animals began to grow on the island they all
grew the wrong sizes. The guinea pig, as you know, was as big as our
elephants, and the elephant--dear little pet--was the size of the silly,
tiny, black-and-tan dogs that ladies carry sometimes in their muffs. The
rabbits were about the size of our rhinoceroses, and all about the wild
parts of the island they had made their burrows as big as railway
tunnels. The dormouse, of course, was the biggest of all the creatures.
I can't tell you how big he was. Even if you think of elephants it will
not help you at all. Luckily there was only one of him, and he was
always asleep. Otherwise I don't think the Rotundians could have borne
with him. As it was, they made him a house, and it saved the expense of
a brass band, because no band could possibly have been heard when the
dormouse was talking in his sleep.

The men and women and children in this wonderful island were quite the
right size, because their ancestors had come over with the Conqueror
long after the island had settled down and the animals grown on it.

Now the natural history lesson is over, and if you have been attending,
you know more about Rotundia than anyone there did, except three people:
the Lord Chief Schoolmaster, the Princess's uncle--who was a magician,
and knew everything without learning it--and Tom, the gardener's son.

Tom had learned more at school than anyone else, because he wished to
take a prize. The prize offered by the Lord Chief Schoolmaster was a
_History of Rotundia_, beautifully bound, with the Royal arms on the
back. But after that day when the Princess said she meant to marry Tom,
the gardener's boy thought it over, and he decided that the best prize
in the world would be the Princess, and this was the prize Tom meant to
take; and when you are a gardener's son and have decided to marry a
Princess, you will find that the more you learn at school the better.

The Princess always played with Tom on the days