To Dr. Wallis Budge of the British Museum this book is dedicated as a small token of gratitude for his unfailing kindness and help in the making of it...

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 cr...

Long ago⁠—that is to say last summer⁠—the children, finding themselves embarrassed by some wish which the Psammead had granted them, and which the servants had not received in a proper spirit, had wis...

The learned gentleman had let his dinner get quite cold. It was mutton chop, and as it lay on the plate it looked like a brown island in the middle of a frozen pond, because the grease of the gravy ha...

Next morning Anthea got old Nurse to allow her to take up the “poor learned gentleman’s” breakfast. He did not recognize her at first, but when he did he was vaguely pleased to see her. “You see I’m w...

Here was a horrible position! Four English children, whose proper date was AD 1905, and whose proper address was London, set down in Egypt in the year 6000 BC with no means whatever of getting back in...

“How many miles to Babylon? Three score and ten! Can I get there by candle light? Yes, and back again!” Jane was singing to her doll, rocking it to and fro in the house which she had made for herself ...

The Queen threw three of the red and gold embroidered cushions off the throne on to the marble steps that led up to it. “Just make yourselves comfortable there,” she said. “I’m simply dying to talk to...

“Now tell us what happened to you,” said Cyril to Jane, when he and the others had told her all about the Queen’s talk and the banquet, and the variety entertainment, carefully stopping short before t...

You will understand that the adventure of the Babylonian queen in London was the only one that had occupied any time at all. But the children’s time was very fully taken up by talking over all the won...

A great city swept away by the sea, a beautiful country devastated by an active volcano⁠—these are not the sort of things you see every day of the week. And when you do see them, no matter how many ot...

It was the day after the adventure of Julius Caesar and the Little Black Girl that Cyril, bursting into the bathroom to wash his hands for dinner (you have no idea how dirty they were, for he had been...

“Look here,” said Cyril, sitting on the dining-table and swinging his legs; “I really have got it.” “Got what?” was the not unnatural rejoinder of the others. Cyril was making a boat with a penknife a...

“Blue and red,” said Jane softly, “make purple.” “Not always they don’t,” said Cyril, “it has to be crimson lake and Prussian blue. If you mix Vermilion and Indigo you get the most loathsome slate col...

If I only had time I could tell you lots of things. For instance, how, in spite of the advice of the Psammead, the four children did, one very wet day, go through their Amulet Arch into the golden des...