he opened them and say:--

"Another story come home to roost. Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" and then the
children would be very sorry.

But sometimes she would wave the envelope in the air and say:--"Hooray,
hooray. Here's a sensible Editor. He's taken my story and this is the
proof of it."

At first the children thought 'the Proof' meant the letter the sensible
Editor had written, but they presently got to know that the proof was
long slips of paper with the story printed on them.

Whenever an Editor was sensible there were buns for tea.

One day Peter was going down to the village to get buns to celebrate
the sensibleness of the Editor of the Children's Globe, when he met the
Station Master.

Peter felt very uncomfortable, for he had now had time to think over the
affair of the coal-mine. He did not like to say "Good morning" to the
Station Master, as you usually do to anyone you meet on a lonely road,
because he had a hot feeling, which spread even to his ears, that the
Station Master might not care to speak to a person who had stolen coals.
'Stolen' is a nasty word, but Peter felt it was the right one. So he
looked down, and said Nothing.

It was the Station Master who said "Good morning" as he passed by. And
Peter answered, "Good morning." Then he thought:--

"Perhaps he doesn't know who I am by daylight, or he wouldn't be so
polite."

And he did not like the feeling which thinking this gave him. And then
before he knew what he was going to do he ran after the Station Master,
who stopped when he heard Peter's hasty boots crunching the road,
and coming up with him very breathless and with his ears now quite
magenta-coloured, he said:--

"I don't want you to be polite to me if you don't know me when you see
me."

"Eh?" said the Station Master.

"I thought perhaps you didn't know it was me that took the coals,"
Peter went on, "when you said 'Good morning.' But it was, and I'm sorry.
There."

"Why," said the Station Master, "I wasn't thinking anything at all about
the precious coals. Let bygones be bygones. And where were you off to in
such a hurry?"

"I'm going to buy buns for tea," said Peter.

"I thought you were all so poor," said the Station Master.

"So we are," said Peter, confidentially, "but we always have three
pennyworth of halfpennies for tea whenever Mother sells a story or a
poem or anything."

"Oh," said the Station Master, "so your Mother writes stories, does
she?"

"The beautifulest yo