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The End in his hand. The King and Queen of the Under Folk must have said at once the charm to recall the children to earth.

"It works more slowly on land, the Astrologer said," Reuben remarked. "Before we drink and forget everything I want to tell you that I think you've all been real bricks to me. And if you don't mind, I'll take off these girls' things."

He did, appearing in shirt and knickerbockers.

"Good-bye," he said, shaking hands with everyone.

"But aren't you coming home with us?"

"No," he said, "the Astrologer told me the first man and woman I should see on land would be my long-lost Father and Mother, and I was to go straight to them with my little shirt and my little shoe that I've kept all this time, the ones that were mine when I was a stolen baby, and they'd know me and I should belong to them. But I hope we'll meet again some day. Good-bye, and thank you. It was ripping being General of the Sea Urchins."

With that they drank each a draught from the ginger beer bottle, and then, making haste to act before the oblivion-cup should blot out with other things the Astrologer's advice, Reuben went out of the wood into the sunshine and across a green turf. They saw him speak to a man and a woman in blue bathing dresses who seemed to have been swimming in the lake and now were resting on the marble steps that led down to it. He held out the little shirt and the little shoe, and they held their hands out to him. And as they turned the children saw that their faces were the faces of the King and Queen of the Under Folk, only now not sad anymore, but radiant with happiness, because they had found their son again.

"Of course," said Francis, "there isn't any time in the other world. I expect they were swimming and just dived, and all that happened to them just in the minute they were underwater."

"And Reuben is really their long-lost heir?" 177