Sabrina Fair
joyous surprise to him to come face-to-face with our jellyfish; he'll offer to teach Francis all about science for nothing—I see," said Kathleen hopefully.
"But how will you get it to the seaside?" Bernard asked, leaning his hands on the schoolroom table and breathing heavily into the aquarium, so that its shining sides became dim and misty. "It's much too big to go in the boxes, you know."
"Then I'll carry it," said Francis, "it won't be in the way at all—I carried it home today."
"We had to take the bus, you know," said truthful Mavis, "and then I had to help you."
"I don't believe they'll let you take it at all," said Bernard—if you know anything of grown-ups you will know that Bernard proved to be quite right.
"Take an aquarium to the seaside—nonsense!" they said. And "What for?" not waiting for the answer. "They," just at present, was Aunt Enid.
Francis had always been passionately fond of water. Even when he was a baby he always stopped crying the moment they put him in the bath. And he was the little boy who, at the age of four, was lost for three hours and then brought home by the police who had found him sitting in a horse trough in front of the Willing Mind, wet to the topmost hair of his head, and quite happy, entertaining a circle of carters with pots of beer in their hands. There was very little water in the horse trough and the most talkative of the carters explained that, the kid being that wet at the first start off, him and his mates thought he was as safe in the trough as anywhere—the weather being what it was and all them nasty motors and trams about.
To Francis, passionately attracted as he was by water in all forms, from the simple mud puddle to the complicated machin-
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