The Story of the Amulet E-Book

Edith Nesbit

• Herausgeber: Edith Nesbit
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This book is the final part of a trilogy of novels that also includes Five Children and It (1902) and the Phoenix and the carpet (1904). At, the children's father, is a journalist, who went abroad to cover the war in Manchuria. The mother went to Madeira to recover from an illness, bringing with her younger brother. The children are living with an elderly nurse who established a boardinghouse in Central London. She lives with a studious Egyptologist who has filled his bedsit with ancient artifacts. Children know the scholar and become friends with him and call him Jimmy. In a shop full of unusual merchandise children find the Psammead. It had been captured by a trapper, who failed to recognize him as a magical being. The terrified creature cannot escape, but it can only grant the wishes of others, not for himself. Using a ruse, the children convince the retailer to sell them the "Mangy old monkey" and liberate their old friend.

Leseprobe

THE STORY OF THE AMULET

By

Edith Nesbit

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CHAPTER 1. THE PSAMMEAD

CHAPTER 2. THE HALF AMULET

CHAPTER 3. THE PAST

CHAPTER 4. EIGHT THOUSAND YEARS AGO

CHAPTER 5. THE FIGHT IN THE VILLAGE

CHAPTER 6. THE WAY TO BABYLON

CHAPTER 7. 'THE DEEPEST DUNGEON BELOW THE CASTLE MOAT'

CHAPTER 8. THE QUEEN IN LONDON

CHAPTER 9. ATLANTIS

CHAPTER 10. THE LITTLE BLACK GIRL AND JULIUS CAESAR

CHAPTER 11. BEFORE PHARAOH

CHAPTER 12. THE SORRY-PRESENT AND THE EXPELLED LITTLE BOY

CHAPTER 13. THE SHIPWRECK ON THE TIN ISLANDS

CHAPTER 14. THE HEART'S DESIRE

CHAPTER 1. THE PSAMMEAD

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur—and it had hands and feet like a monkey's. It told the children—whose names were Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane—that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never could think of just the right things to wish for, and their wishes sometimes turned out very oddly indeed. In the end their unwise wishings landed them in what Robert called 'a very tight place indeed', and the Psammead consented to help them out of it in return for their promise never never to ask it to grant them any more wishes, and never to tell anyone about it, because it did not want to be bothered to give wishes to anyone ever any more. At the moment of parting Jane said politely—

'I wish we were going to see you again some day.'

And the Psammead, touched by this friendly thought, granted the wish. The book about all this is called Five Children and It, and it ends up in a most tiresome way by saying—

'The children DID see the Psammead again, but it was not in the sandpit; it was—but I must say no more—'

The reason that nothing more could be said was that I had not then been able to find out exactly when and where the children met the Psammead again. Of course I knew they would meet it, because it was a beast of its word, and when it said a thing would happen, that thing happened without fail. How different from the people who tell us about what weather it is going to be on Thursday next, in London, the South Coast, and Channel!

The summer holidays during which the Psammead had been found and the wishes given had been wonderful holidays in the country, and the children had the highest hopes of just such another holiday for the next summer. The winter holidays were beguiled by the wonderful happenings of The Phoenix and the Carpet, and the loss of these two treasures would have left the children in despair, but for the splendid hope of their next holiday in the country. The world, they felt, and indeed had some reason to feel, was full of wonderful things—and they were really the sort of people that wonderful things happen to. So they looked forward to the summer holiday; but when it came everything was different, and very, very horrid. Father had to go out to Manchuria to telegraph news about the war to the tiresome paper he wrote for—the Daily Bellower, or something like that, was its name. And Mother, poor dear Mother, was away in Madeira, because she had been very ill. And The Lamb—I mean the baby—was with her. And Aunt Emma, who was Mother's sister, had suddenly married Uncle Reginald, who was Father's brother, and they had gone to China, which is much too far off for you to expect to be asked to spend the holidays in, however fond your aunt and uncle may be of you. So the children were left in the care of old Nurse, who lived in Fitzroy Street, near the British Museum, and though she was always very kind to them, and indeed spoiled them far more than would be good for the most grown-up of us, the four children felt perfectly wretched, and when the cab had driven off with Father and all his boxes and guns and the sheepskin, with blankets and the aluminium mess-kit inside it, the stoutest heart quailed, and the girls broke down altogether, and sobbed in each other's arms, while the boys each looked out of one of the long gloomy windows of the parlour, and tried to pretend that no boy would be such a muff as to cry.