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42 what it is, let alone being able to do it. Could you do it, Matilda?”

“No,” said Matilda, “but let me whisper. He’s listening. Pridmore could. She’s often told me she’d do it to me. But she never has. Oh, Princess, I’ve got an idea.”

The two were whispering so low that the Cockatoucan could not hear, though he tried his hardest. Matilda and the Princess left him listening.

Presently he heard a sound of wheels. Four men came into the rose-garden wheeling a great red thing in a barrow. They set it down in front of the Cockatoucan, who danced on his perch with rage.

“Oh,” he said, “if only some one would make me laugh, that horrible thing would be the one to change. I know it would. It would change into something much horrider than it is now. I feel it in all my feathers.”

The Princess opened the cage-door with the Prime Minister’s key, which a tenor singer had found at the beginning of his music. It was also the key of the comic opera. She crept up behind the Cockatoucan and tickled him under both wings. He fixed his baleful eye on the red Automatic Machine and laughed long and loud; he saw the red iron