Un beau jour, Cyril, Robert, Anthea et Jane délivrent des griffes d'un marchand un animal extraordinaire doué de parole : la Mirobolante. Le jour même, les enfants se retrouvent en possession d'une amulette capable de réaliser leurs désirs les plus chers... À condition, qu'ils retrouvent l'autre moitié du talisman, et que jamais ils n'en oublient la formule magique. C'est alors que commence un fabuleux voyage dans le passé.

Le secret de l'amulette

En construisant un château, Anthea, Jane, Cyril et Robert découvrent, enfouie dans le sable, une créature qui dit pouvoir exaucer leurs voeux. Être riche, voler comme un oiseau ou devenir chevalier... Qui n'a jamais rêvé de voir ses souhaits se réaliser ? Mais attention ! le rêve peut rapidement virer au cauchemar : les enfants apprennent à leurs dépens que la magie se retourne parfois contre celui qui en fait mauvais usage.

Cinq enfants et moi

The house was three miles from the station, but, before the dusty hired hack had rattled along for five minutes, the children began to put their heads out of the carriage window and say, "Aren't we nearly there?" And every time they passed a house, which was not very often, they all said, "Oh, is this it?" But it never was, till they reached the very top of the hill, just past the chalk-quarry and before you come to the gravel-pit. And then there was a white house with a green garden and an orchard beyond, and mother said, "Here we are!"

"How white the house is, " said Robert.

"And look at the roses, " said Anthea.

"And the plums, " said Jane.

"It is rather decent, " Cyril admitted.

The Baby said, "Wanty go walky;" and the hack stopped with a last rattle and jolt.

Five Children and It

The writings of Shakespeare have been justly termed "the richest, the purest, the fairest, that genius uninspired ever penned."

Shakespeare instructed by delighting. His plays alone (leaving mere science out of the question), contain more actual wisdom than the whole body of English learning. He is the teacher of all good-- pity, generosity, true courage, love. His bright wit is cut out "into little stars." His solid masses of knowledge are meted out in morsels and proverbs, and thus distributed, there is scarcely a corner of the English-speaking world today which he does not illuminate, or a cottage which he does not enrich. His bounty is like the sea, which, though often unacknowledged, is everywhere felt. As his friend, Ben Jonson, wrote of him, "He was not of an age but for all time." He ever kept the highroad of human life whereon all travel. He did not pick out by-paths of feeling and sentiment. In his creations we have no moral highwaymen, sentimental thieves, interesting villains, and amiable, elegant adventuresses--no delicate entanglements of situation, in which the grossest images are presented to the mind disguised under the superficial attraction of style and sentiment. He flattered no bad passion, disguised no vice in the garb of virtue, trifled with no just and generous principle. While causing us to laugh at folly, and shudder at crime, he still preserves our love for our fellow-beings, and our reverence for ourselves.

Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare

It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast-Robert's, I fancy-as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration.

'They were jolly cheap, ' said whoever it was, and I think it was Robert, 'and suppose they didn't go off on the night? Those Prosser kids would have something to snigger about then.'

'The ones I got are all right, ' Jane said; 'I know they are, because the man at the shop said they were worth thribble the money-'

'I'm sure thribble isn't grammar, ' Anthea said.

'Of course it isn't, ' said Cyril; 'one word can't be grammar all by itself, so you needn't be so jolly clever.'

The Phoenix and the Carpet

THAT going to the seaside was the very beginning of everything-only it seemed as though it were going to be a beginning without an end, like the roads on the Sussex downs which look like roads and then look like paths, and then turn into sheep tracks, and then are just grass and furze bushes and tottergrass and harebells and rabbits and chalk.

The children had been counting the days to The Day. Bernard indeed had made a calendar on a piece of cardboard that had once been the bottom of the box in which his new white sandshoes came home. He marked the divisions of the weeks quite neatly in red ink, and the days were numbered in blue ink, and every day he crossed off one of those numbers with a piece of green chalk he happened to have left out of a penny box. Mavis had washed and ironed all the dolls' clothes at least a fortnight before The Day. This was thoughtful and farsighted of her, of course, but it was a little trying to Kathleen, who was much younger and who would have preferred to go on playing with her dolls in their dirtier and more familiar state.

Wet Magic

There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail's eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat's ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider's and covered with thick soft fur-and it had hands and feet like a monkey's. It told the children-whose names were Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane-that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane now found their wishes come true; but, somehow, they never could think of just the right things to wish for, and their wishes sometimes turned out very oddly indeed. In the end their unwise wishings landed them in what Robert called 'a very tight place indeed', and the Psammead consented to help them out of it in return for their promise never never to ask it to grant them any more wishes, and never to tell anyone about it, because it did not want to be bothered to give wishes to anyone ever any more. At the moment of parting Jane said politely-

'I wish we were going to see you again some day.'

And the Psammead, touched by this friendly thought, granted the wish.

The Story of the Amulet

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.

There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, "'Alas!" said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, "we must look our last on this ancestral home"'-and then some one else says something-and you don't know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don't care because I don't tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all.

Le secret de l'amulette

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