But there really was
almost everything else. Everything that the children had always
wanted--toys and games and books, and chocolate and candied
cherries and paint-boxes and photographic cameras, and all the
presents they had always wanted to give to father and mother and
the Lamb, only they had never had the money for them. At the very
bottom of the box was a tiny golden feather. No one saw it but
Robert, and he picked it up and hid it in the breast of his jacket,
which had been so often the nesting-place of the golden bird. When
he went to bed the feather was gone. It was the last he ever saw
of the Phoenix.
Pinned to the lovely fur cloak that mother had always wanted was a
paper, and it said--
'In return for the carpet. With gratitude.--P.'
You may guess how father and mother talked it over. They decided
at last the person who had had the carpet, and whom, curiously
enough, the children were quite unable to describe, must be an
insane millionaire who amused himself by playing at being a
rag-and-bone man. But the children knew better.
They knew that this was the fulfilment, by the powerful Psammead,
of the last wish of the Phoenix, and that this glorious and
delightful boxful of treasures was really the very, very, very end
of the Phoenix and the Carpet.
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