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
