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 to be so as long after he quits it. But some people have what we may call “The Leaden Touch,” and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.’

‘You are a smart child, Primrose, to be not yet in your teens,’ said Eustace, taken rather aback by the piquancy of her criticism. ‘But you well know, in your naughty little heart, that I have burnished the old gold of Midas all over anew, and have made it shine as it never shone before. And then that figure of Marygold! Do you perceive no nice workmanship in that? And how finely I have brought out and deepened the moral! What say you, Sweet Fern, Dandelion, Clover, Periwinkle? Would any of you, after hearing this story, be so foolish as to desire the faculty of changing things to gold?’

‘I should like,’ said Periwinkle, a girl of ten, ‘to have the power of turning everything to gold with my right forefinger; but, with my left forefinger, I should want the power of changing it back again, if the first change did not please me. And I know what I would do, this very afternoon!’

‘Pray tell me,’ said Eustace.

‘Why,’ answered Periwinkle, ‘I would touch every one of these golden leaves on the trees with my left forefinger, and make them all green again; so that we might have the summer back at once, with no ugly winter in the meantime.’

‘O Periwinkle!’ cried Eustace Bright, ‘there you are wrong, and would do a great deal of mischief. Were I Midas, I would make nothing else but just such golden days as these over and over again, all the year throughout. My best thoughts always come a little too late. Why did