ed hard, so that they all throve and
were very happy as long as ever they lived.

Said Joyce one day to Diggory, 'How was it you wanted to take me with
you directly you came back, and when you were going away you didn't.'

'I've often wondered about that myself,' he said; 'I think it must have
been the bread-and-milk. You see, it was one of the wish-apple things,
just like the horses were, only they were outside things, so they made
me old outside; but the bread-and milk----'

'Was an inside thing, of course--quite inside.'

'Yes, so it made me old inside of my mind, just old enough to have the
sense to see that _you_ were all the fortune I wanted, and more than I
deserved.'

'I didn't have to be so very old to know what fortune _I_ wanted,' said
Joyce, 'but, then, I was a girl. Boys are always much stupider than
girls, aren't they?'

* * * * *

The only person in this story you are likely to have heard of is, of
course, Invicta, and he is better known as the White Horse of Kent.

You can see pictures of him all over his county: on brewers circulars
and all sorts of documents, and carved in stone on buildings, and even
on the disagreeable, insulting fronts of traction-engines.
Traction-engines pretend to despise horses, but they carry the image of
the White Horse on their hearts. And his name is generally put
underneath his picture, so that there shall be no mistake.

SIR CHRISTOPHER COCKLESHELL

The children called him Sir Christopher Cockleshell.--'Sir,' in token of
respect for his gray hairs and noble-looking face; Christopher, because
he had once carried Mabel across the road on a very muddy day, when
thunder showers and the parish water-carts had both been particularly
busy; and Cockleshell, because of the house he lived in.

It was a most wonderful house--like the gateway of an old castle. It had
a big arch in the middle and a window over the arch, and there were
windows, too, in the towers on each side of the arch. All along the top
were in-and-out battlements. It had been covered with white plaster
once, but flakes of this had fallen away and showed the pinky bricks
underneath. But the oddest thing about the house was the trimming that
ran all round the bottom story about the height of a tall man. This
trimming was of oyster-shells, and cockle-shells, and mussel-shells,
and whelk-shells, and scallop-shells, all stuck on the wall of the house
in patterns. It was