This beautiful HarperCollins Children's Classics edition is perfect for every bookshelf. 

 Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis have lost their father. He has disappeared and, with him, their happy life in London too. They have a new life now, in a new place, in a new (but truly quite old and shabby) home beyond the train tracks.

 Each day of this new life, they greet the 9.15am train and hope it carries their love to Father, wherever he has gone. But the railway promises to bring something else entirely .

The Railway Children

Philip Haldane and his sister lived in a little red-roofed house in a little red-roofed town. They had a little garden and a little balcony, and a little stable with a little pony in it-and a little cart for the pony to draw; a little canary hung in a little cage in the little bow-window, and the neat little servant kept everything as bright and clean as a little new pin.

Philip had no one but his sister, and she had no one but Philip. Their parents were dead, and Helen, who was twenty years older than Philip and was really his half-sister, was all the mother he had ever known. And he had never envied other boys their mothers, because Helen was so kind and clever and dear. She gave up almost all her time to him; she taught him all the lessons he learned; she played with him, inventing the most wonderful new games and adventures. So that every morning when Philip woke he knew that he was waking to a new day of joyous and interesting happenings. And this went on till Philip was ten years old, and he had no least shadow of a doubt that it would go on for ever. The beginning of the change came one day when he and Helen had gone for a picnic to the wood where the waterfall was, and as they were driving back behind the stout old pony, who was so good and quiet that Philip was allowed to drive it. They were coming up the last lane before the turning where their house was, and Helen said:

'To-morrow we'll weed the aster bed and have tea in the garden.'

The Magic City

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

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

MATILDA'S ears were red and shiny. So were her cheeks. Her hands were red too. This was because Pridmore had washed her. It was not the usual washing, which makes you clean and comfortable, but the "thorough good wash, " which makes you burn and smart till you wish you could be like the poor little savages who do not know anything, and run about bare in the sun, and only go into the water when they are hot.

Matilda wished she could have been born in a savage tribe instead of at Brixton.

"Little savages, " she said, "don't have their ears washed thoroughly, and they don?t have new dresses that are prickly in the insides round their arms, and cut them round the neck. Do they, Pridmore?"

But Pridmore only said, "Stuff and nonsense, " and then she said, "don't wriggle so, child, for goodness' sake."

Nine Unlikely Tales

There were three of them-Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course, Jerry's name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may think; and Jimmy's name was James; and Kathleen was never called by her name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when her brothers were pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they were not pleased. And they were at school in a little town in the West of England-the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day. They used to see each other on Saturdays and Sundays at the house of a kind maiden lady; but it was one of those houses where it is impossible to play. You know the kind of house, don't you? There is a sort of a something about that kind of house that makes you hardly able even to talk to each other when you are left alone, and playing seems unnatural and affected. So they looked forward to the holidays, when they should all go home and be together all day long, in a house where playing was natural and conversation possible, and where the Hampshire forests and fields were full of interesting things to do and see.

The Enchanted Castle

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

Edith Nesbit's natural gift for storytelling has brought her worldwide renown as a classic children's author. But beyond her beloved children's stories lay a darker side to her imagination, revealed here in her chilling tales of the supernatural.

 Haunted by lifelong phobias which provoked, in her own words, 'nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread', Nesbit was inspired to pen terrifying stories of a twilight world where the dead walked the earth.

 All but forgotten for almost a hundred years until In the Dark was first published 30 years ago, this collection finally restored Nesbit's reputation as a one of the most accomplished and entertaining ghost-story writers of the Victorian age.

 With seven extra newly-discovered stories now appearing for the first time in paperback, this revised edition includes an introduction by Hugh Lamb exploring the life of the woman behind these tales and the events and experiences that contributed to her fascination with the macabre.

The Railway Children

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