Part 30

'Hedge-pigs are very wise little beasts,' said Erinaceus, 'but I only knew that when you told it me.'

'I--told you?'

'When you kissed my little pointed face, Princess,' said Erinaceus, 'I knew then.'

'My goodness gracious me,' said the King.

'Quite so,' said Benevola, 'and I wouldn't ask any one to the wedding.'

'Except you, dear,' said the Queen.

'Well, as I happened to be passing ... there's no time like the present,' said Benevola briskly. 'Suppose you give orders for the wedding bells to be rung now, at once!'

SEPTIMUS SEPTIMUSSON

The wind was screaming over the marsh. It shook the shutters and rattled the windows, and the little boy lay awake in the bare attic. His mother came softly up the ladder stairs shading the flame of the tallow candle with her hand.

'I'm not asleep, mother,' said he. And she heard the tears in his voice.

'Why, silly lad,' she said, sitting down on the straw-bed beside him and putting the candle on the floor, 'what are you crying for?'

'It's the wind keeps calling me, mother,' he said. 'It won't let me alone. It never has since I put up the little weather-cock for it to play with. It keeps saying, "Wake up, Septimus Septimusson, wake up, you're the seventh son of a seventh son. You can see the fairies and hear the beasts speak, and you must go out and seek your fortune." And I'm afraid, and I don't want to go.'

'I should think not indeed,' said his mother. 'The wind doesn't talk, Sep, not really. You just go to sleep like a good boy, and I'll get father to bring you a gingerbread pig from the fair to-morrow.'

But Sep lay awake a long time listening to what the wind really did keep on saying, and feeling ashamed to think how frightened he was of going out all alone to seek his fortune--a thing all the boys in books were only too happy to do.

Next evening father brought home the loveliest gingerbread pig with currant eyes. Sep ate it, and it made him less anxious than ever to go out into the world where, perhaps, no one would give him gingerbread pigs ever any more.

Before he went to bed he ran down to the shore where a great new harbour was being made. The workmen had been blasting the big rocks, and on one of the rocks a lot of mussels were sticking. He stood looking at them, and then suddenly he heard a lot of little voices crying, 'Oh Sep, we're so frightened, we're choking.'

The voices were thin and sharp as the edges of mussel shells. They were indeed the voices of the mussels themselves.

'Oh dear,' said Sep, 'I'm so sorry, but I can't move the rock back into the sea, you know. Can I now?'

'No,' said the mussels, 'but if you speak to the wind,--you know his language and he's very fond of you since you made that toy for him,--he'll blow the sea up till the waves wash us back into deep water.'

'But I'm afraid of the wind,' said Sep, 'it says things that frighten me.'

'Oh very well,' said the mussels, 'we don't want you to be afraid. We can die all right if necessary.'

Then Sep shivered and trembled.

'Go away,' said the thin sharp voices. 'We'll die--but we'd rather die in our own brave company.'

'I know I'm a coward,' said Sep. 'Oh, wait a minute.'

'Death won't wait,' said the little voices.

'I can't speak to the wind, I won't,' said Sep, and almost at the same moment he heard himself call out, 'Oh wind, please come and blow up the waves to save the poor mussels.'

The wind answered with a boisterous shout--

'All right, my boy,' it shrieked, 'I'm coming.' And come it did. And when it had attended to the mussels it came and whispered to Sep in his attic. And to his great surprise, instead of covering his head with the bed-clothes, as usual, and trying not to listen, he found himself sitting up in bed and talking to the wind, man to man.