... Yet in the tumult and confusion such curious
behaviour followed. For Come-Back Stumper, crying that he saw a purple
beetle pass across the world, proceeded to curl up as though he
crawled into a spiral snail-shell and meant to go to sleep in it; Tim
shouted in the darkness that he was riding a huge badger down a hole
that led to the centre of the earth; and Uncle Felix begged every one
to look and see what he saw, darkness or no darkness--"the splash of
misty blue upon the body of a dragon-fly!"
They might almost have been telling their dreams at breakfast-time....
But while the clamour of their excited voices stirred the world
beneath the marvellous covering, there rose that other sound--
increasing until it overpowered every word they uttered. In the world
outside there was a clicking, grating, hard, metallic sound--as though
machinery was starting somewhere....
And Judy, managing somehow or other to lift a corner and peer out, saw
that the dawn was breaking in the eastern sky, and that a new day was
just beginning. The sun was rising.... She went back again to tell the
others, but she could not find them.
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