Wet Magic
ery by which your bath supply is enabled to get out of order, it was a real tragedy that he had never seen the sea. Something had always happened to prevent it. Holidays had been spent in green countries where there were rivers and wells and ponds, and waters deep and wide—but the water had been fresh water, and the green grass had been on each side of it. One great charm of the sea, as he had heard of it, was that it had nothing on the other side "so far as eye could see." There was a lot about the sea in poetry, and Francis, curiously enough, liked poetry.
The buying of the aquarium had been an attempt to make sure that, having found the sea, he should not lose it again. He imagined the aquarium fitted with a real rock in the middle, to which radiant sea anemones clung and limpets stuck. There were to be yellow periwinkles too, and seaweeds, and gold and silver fish (which don't live in the sea by the way, only Francis didn't know this), flitting about in radiant scaly splendor, among the shadows of the growing water plants. He had thought it all out—how a cover might be made, very light, with rubber in between, like a screw-top bottle, to keep the water in while it traveled home in the guard's van to the admiration of passengers and porters at both stations. And now—he was not to be allowed to take it.
He told Mavis, and she agreed with him that it was a shame.
"But I'll tell you what," she said, for she was not one of those comforters who just say, "I'm sorry," and don't try to help. She generally thought of something that would make things at any rate just a little better. "Let's fill it with fresh water, and get some goldfish and sand and weeds; and I'll make Eliza promise to put ants' eggs in—that's what they eat—and it'll be something to break the dreadful shock when we have to leave the sea and come home again."
Francis admitted that there was something in this and consented to fill the aquarium with water from the bath. When this
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