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Rh “Not at all,” said the seal. “Nothing is wrong here—as long as you’re good. Let me teach you water-leapfrog—a most glorious game, so cool, yet so exciting. You try it.”

At last the seal said: “I suppose you wear man-clothes. They’re very inconvenient. My two eldest have just outgrown their coats. If you’ll accept them——”

And it dived, and came up with two golden sealskin coats over its arm, and the children put them on.

“Thank you very much,” they said. “You are kind.”

I am almost sure that it has never been your luck to wear a fur coat that fitted you like a skin, and that could not be spoiled with sand or water, or jam, or bread and milk, or any of the things with which you mess up the nice new clothes your kind relations buy for you. But if you like, you may try to imagine how jolly the little coats were.

Thomasina and Selim played all day on the beach, and when they were tired then went into a cave, and found supper—salmon and cucumber, and welsh-rabbit and lemonade—and then they went to bed in a great heap of straw and grass and fern and dead leaves, and