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 questions about it. The box was left here to be kept safely, and I do not myself know what it contains.’

‘But who gave it to you?’ asked Pandora. ‘And where did it come from?’

‘That is a secret too,’ replied Epimetheus.

‘How provoking!’ exclaimed Pandora, pouting her lip. ‘I wish the great ugly box were out of the way!’

‘Oh come, don’t think of it any more,’ cried Epimetheus. ‘Let us run out of doors, and have some nice play with the other children.’

It is thousands of years since Epimetheus and Pandora were alive; and the world, nowadays, is a very different sort of thing from what it was in their time. Then, everybody was a child. There needed no fathers and mothers to take care of the children; because there was no danger, nor trouble of any kind, and no clothes to be mended, and there was always plenty to eat and drink. Whenever a child wanted his dinner, he found it growing on a tree; and, if he looked at the tree in the morning, he could see the expanding blossom of that night’s supper; or, at eventide, he saw the tender bud of to-morrow’s breakfast. It was a very pleasant life indeed. No labour to be done, no tasks to be studied; nothing but sports and dances, and sweet voices of children talking, or carolling like birds, or gushing out in merry laughter, throughout the livelong day.

What was most wonderful of all, the children never quarrelled among themselves; neither had they any crying fits; nor, since time first began, had a single one of these little mortals ever gone apart into a corner, and sulked. Oh, what a good time was that to be alive in!