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,