by Edith Nesbit
Edward was not grown-up — and he kept everything he found, including sea-mice, till the landlady of the lodgings where his aunt was threw his collection into the pig-pail.
Being a quiet and persevering little boy he did not cry or complain, but having meekly followed his treasures to their long home — the pig was six feet from nose to tail, and ate the dead sea-mouse as easily and happily as your father eats an oyster — he started out to make a new collection.
And the first thing he found was an oyster-shell that was pink and green and blue inside, and the second was an old boot — very old indeed — and the third was it.
It was a square case of old leather embossed with odd little figures of men and animals and words that Edward could not read. It was oblong and had no key, but a sort of leather hasp, and was curiously knotted with string — rather like a boot-lace. And Edward opened it. There were several things inside: queer-looking instruments, some rather like those in the little box of mathematical instruments that he had had as a prize at school, and some like nothing he had ever seen before. And in a deep groove of the russet soaked velvet lining lay a neat little brass telescope.
T-squares and set-squares and so forth are of little use on a sandy shore. But you can always look through a telescope.
Edward picked it out and put it to his eye, and tried to see through it a little tug that was sturdily puffing up Channel. He failed to find the tug, and found himself gazing at a little cloud on the horizon. As he looked it grew larger and darker, and presently a spot of rain fell on his nose. He rubbed it off — on his jersey sleeve, I am sorry to say, and not on his handkerchief. Then he looked through the glass again; but he found he needed both hands to keep it steady, so he set down the box with the other instruments on the sand at his feet and put the glass to his eye again.
He never saw the box again. For in his unpractised efforts to cover the tug with his glass he found himself looking at the shore instead of at the sea, and the shore looked so odd that he could not make up his mind to stop looking at it.
He had thought it was a sandy shore, but almost at once he saw that it was not sand but fine shingle, and the discovery of this mistake surprised him so much that he kept on looking at the shingle through the little telescope, which showed it quite plainly. And as he looked the shingle grew coarser; it was stones now — quite decent-sized stones, large stones, enormous stones.
Something hard pressed against his foot, and he lowered the glass.
He was surrounded by big stones, and they all seemed to be moving; some were tumbling off others that lay in heaps below them, and others were rolling away from the beach in every direction. And the place where he had put down the box was covered with great stones which he could not move.
Edward was very much upset. He had never been accustomed to great stones that moved about when no one was touching them, and he looked round for some one to ask how it had happened.
The only person in sight was another boy in a blue jersey with red letters on its chest.
‘Hi!’ said Edward, and the boy also said ‘Hi!’
‘Come along here,’ said Edward, ‘and I’ll show you something.’
‘Right-o!’ the boy remarked, and came.
The boy was staying at the camp where the white tents were below the Grand Redoubt. His home was quite unlike Edward’s, though he also lived with his aunt. The boy’s home was very dirty and very small, and nothing in it was ever in its right place. There was no furniture to speak of. The servants did not wear white caps with long streamers, because there were no servants. His uncle was a dock-labourer and his aunt went out washing. But he had felt just the same pleasure in being shown things that Edward or you or I might have felt, and he went climbing over the big stones to where Edward stood waiting for him in a sort of pit among the stones with the little telescope in his hand.
‘I say,’ said Edward, ‘did you see any one move these stones?’
‘I ain’t only just come up on to the sea-wall,’ said the boy, who was called Gustus.
‘They all came round me,’ said Edward, rather pale. ‘I didn’t see any one shoving them.’
‘Who’re you a-kiddin’ of?’ the boy inquired.
‘But I did,’ said Edward, ‘honour bright I did. I was just taking a squint through this little telescope I’ve found — and they came rolling up to me.’
‘Let’s see what you found,’ said Gustus, and Edward gave him the glass. He directed it with inexpert fingers to the sea-wall, so little trodden that on it the grass grows, and the sea-pinks, and even convolvulus and mock-strawberry.
‘Oh, look!’ cried Edward, very loud. ‘Look at the grass!’
Gustus let the glass fall to long arm’s length and said ‘Krikey!’
The grass and flowers on the sea-wall had grown a foot and a half — quite tropical they looked.
‘Well?’ said Edward.
‘What’s the matter wiv everyfink?’ said Gustus. ‘We must both be a bit balmy, seems ter me.’
‘What’s balmy?’ asked Edward.
‘Off your chump — looney — like what you and me is,’ said Gustus. ‘First I sees things, then I sees you.’
‘It was only fancy, I expect,’ said Edward. ‘I expect the grass on the sea-wall was always like that, really.’
‘Let’s have a look through your spy-glass at that little barge,’ said Gustus, still holding the glass. ‘Come on outer these ‘ere paving-stones.’
‘There was a box,’ said Edward, ‘a box I found with lots of jolly things in it. I laid it down somewhere — and — —’
‘Ain’t that it over there?’ Gustus asked, and levelled the glass at a dark object a hundred yards away. ‘No; it’s only an old boot. I say, this is a fine spy-glass. It does make things come big.’
‘That’s not it. I’m certain I put it down somewhere just here. Oh, don’t!’
He snatched the glass from Gustus.
‘Look!’ he said, ‘look!’ and pointed.
A hundred yards away stood a boot about as big as the bath you see Marat in at Madame Tussaud’s.
‘S’welp me,’ said Gustus, ‘we’re asleep, both of us, and a-dreaming as things grow while we look at them.’
‘But we’re not dreaming,’ Edward objected. ‘You let me pinch you and you’ll see.’
‘No fun in that,’ said Gustus. ‘Tell you what — it’s the spy-glass — that’s what it is. Ever see any conjuring? I see a chap at the Mile End Empire what made things turn into things like winking. It’s the spy-glass, that’s what it is.’
‘It can’t be,’ said the little boy who lived in a villa.
‘But it is,’ said the little boy who lived in a slum. ‘Teacher says there ain’t no bounds to the wonders of science. Blest if this ain’t one of ‘em.’
‘Let me look,’ said Edward.
‘All right; only you mark me. Whatever you sets eyes on’ll grow and grow — like the flower-tree the conjurer had under the wipe. Don’t you look at me, that’s all. Hold on; I’ll put something up for you to look at — a mark like — something as doesn’t matter.’
He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a boot-lace.
‘I hold this up,’ he said, ‘and you look.’
Next moment he had dropped the boot-lace, which, swollen as it was with the magic of the glass, lay like a snake on the stone at his feet.
So the glass was a magic glass, as, of course, you know already.
‘My!’ said Gustus, ‘wouldn’t I like to look at my victuals through that there!’
* * * * *
Thus we find Edward, of the villa — and through him Gustus, of the slum — in possession of a unique instrument of magic. What could they do with it?
This was the question which they talked over every time they met, and they met continually. Edward’s aunt, who at home watched him as cats watch mice, rashly believed that at the seaside there was no mischief for a boy to get into. And the gentleman who commanded the tented camp believed
in the ennobling effects of liberty.
After the boot, neither had dared to look at anything through the telescope — and so they looked at it, and polished it on their sleeves till it shone again.
Both were agreed that it would be a fine thing to get some money and look at it, so that it would grow big. But Gustus never had any pocket-money, and Edward had had his confiscated to pay for a window he had not intended to break.
Gustus felt certain that some one would find out about the spy-glass and take it away from them. His experience was that anything you happened to like was always taken away. Edward knew that his aunt would want to take the telescope away to ‘take care of’ for him. This had already happened with the carved chessmen that his father had sent him from India.
‘I been thinking,’ said Gustus, on the third day. ‘When I’m a man I’m a-going to be a burglar. You has to use your headpiece in that trade, I tell you. So I don’t think thinking’s swipes, like some blokes do. And I think p’r’aps it don’t turn everything big. An’ if we could find out what it don’t turn big we could see what we wanted to turn big or what it didn’t turn big, and then it wouldn’t turn anything big except what we wanted it to. See?’
Edward did not see; and I don’t suppose you do, either.
So Gustus went on to explain that teacher had told him there were some substances impervious to light, and some to cold, and so on and so forth, and that what they wanted was a substance that should be impervious to the magic effects of the spy-glass.
‘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.
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 the shock of this failure he dropped the spy-glass, picked it up, and tried once more to fix the keeper. Instead he only got a circle of black-lead-coloured elephant; and while he was trying to find the keeper, and finding nothing but more and more of the elephant, a shout startled him and he dropped the glass once more. He was a very clumsy little boy, was Edward.
‘Well,’ said one of the men, ‘what a turn it give me! I thought Jumbo’d grown as big as a railway station, s’welp me if I didn’t.’
‘Now that’s rum,’ said another, ‘so did I.’
‘And he ain’t,’ said a third; ‘seems to me he’s a bit below his usual figure. Got a bit thin or somethink, ain’t he?’
Edward slipped back into the tent unobserved.
‘It’s all right,’ he whispered to his friend, ‘he’s gone back to his proper size, and the man didn’t change at all.’
‘Ho!’ Gustus said slowly—’Ho! All right. Conjuring’s a rum thing. You don’t never know where you are!’
‘Don’t you think you might as well be a conjurer as a burglar?’ suggested Edward, who had had his friend’s criminal future rather painfully on his mind for the last hour.
‘You might,’ said Gustus, ‘not me. My people ain’t dooks to set me up on any such a swell lay as conjuring. Now I’m going to think, I am. You hold your jaw and look at the ‘andsome Dona a-doin’ of ‘er griceful barebacked hact.’
That evening after tea Edward went, as he had been told to do, to the place on the shore where the big stones had taught him the magic of the spy-glass.
Gustus was already at the tryst.
‘See here,’ he said, ‘I’m a-goin’ to do something brave and fearless, I am, like Lord Nelson and the boy on the fire-ship. You out with that spy-glass, an’ I’ll let you look at me. Then we’ll know where we are.’
‘But s’pose you turn into a giant?’
‘Don’t care. ‘Sides, I shan’t. T’other bloke didn’t.’
‘P’r’aps,’ said Edward, cautiously, ‘it only works by the seashore.’
‘Ah,’ said Gustus, reproachfully, ‘you’ve been a-trying to think, that’s what you’ve been a-doing. What about the elephant, my emernent scientister? Now, then!’
Very much afraid, Edward pulled out the glass and looked.
And nothing happened.
‘That’s number one,’ said Gustus, ‘now, number two.’
He snatched the telescope from Edward’s hand, and turned it round and looked through the other end at the great stones. Edward, standing by, saw them get smaller and smaller — turn to pebbles, to beach, to sand. When Gustus turned the glass to the giant grass and flowers on the sea-wall, they also drew back into themselves, got smaller and smaller, and presently were as they had been before ever Edward picked up the magic spy-glass.
‘Now we know all about it — I don’t think,’ said Gustus. ‘To-morrow we’ll have a look at that there model engine of yours that you say works.’
They did. They had a look at it through the spy-glass, and it became a quite efficient motor; of rather an odd pattern it is true, and very bumpy, but capable of quite a decent speed. They went up to the hills in it, and so odd was its design that no one who saw it ever forgot it. People talk about that rummy motor at Bonnington and Aldington to this day. They stopped often, to use the spy-glass on various objects. Trees, for instance, could be made to grow surprisingly, and there were patches of giant wheat found that year near Ashford that were never satisfactorily accounted for. Blackberries, too, could be enlarged to a most wonderful and delicious fruit. And the sudden growth of a fugitive toffee-drop found in Edward’s pocket and placed on the hand was a happy surprise. When you scraped the pocket dirt off the outside you had a pound of delicious toffee. Not so happy was the incident of the earwig, which crawled into view when Edward was enlarging a wild strawberry, and had grown the size of a rat before the slow but horrified Edward gained courage to shake it off.
It was a beautiful drive. As they came home they met a woman driving a weak-looking little cow. It went by on one side of the engine and the woman went by on the other. When they were restored to each other the cow was nearly the size
of a cart-horse, and the woman did not recognise it. She ran back along the road after her cow, which must, she said, have taken fright at the beastly motor. She scolded violently as she went. So the boys had to make the cow small again, when she wasn’t looking.
‘This is all very well,’ said Gustus, ‘but we’ve got our fortune to make, I don’t think. We’ve got to get hold of a tanner — or a bob would be better.’
But this was not possible, because that broken window wasn’t paid for, and Gustus never had any money.
‘We ought to be the benefactors of the human race,’ said Edward; ‘make all the good things more and all the bad things less.’
And that was all very well — but the cow hadn’t been a great success, as Gustus reminded him.
‘I see I shall have to do some of my thinking,’ he added.
They stopped in a quiet road close by Dymchurch; the engine was made small again, and Edward went home with it under his arm.
It was the next day that they found the shilling on the road. They could hardly believe their good luck. They went out on to the shore with it, put it on Edward’s hand while Gustus looked at it with the glass, and the shilling began to grow.
‘It’s as big as a saucer,’ said Edward, ‘and it’s heavy. I’ll rest it on these stones. It’s as big as a plate; it’s as big as a tea-tray; it’s as big as a cart-wheel.’
And it was.
‘Now,’ said Gustus, ‘we’ll go and borrow a cart to take it away. Come on.’
But Edward could not come on. His hand was in the hollow between the two stones, and above lay tons of silver. He could not move, and the stones couldn’t move. There was nothing for it but to look at the great round lump of silver through the wrong end of the spy-glass till it got small enough for Edward to lift it. And then, unfortunately, Gustus looked a little too long, and the shilling, having gone back to its own size, went a little further — and it went to sixpenny size, and then went out altogether.
So nobody got anything by that.
And now came the time when, as was to be expected, Edward dropped the telescope in his aunt’s presence. She said, ‘What’s that?’ picked it up with quite unfair quickness, and looked through it, and through the open window at a fishing-boat, which instantly swelled to the size of a man-of-war.