The Ogre Downstairs Read Online Free PDF

air about eighteen inches above the littered floor. He was not very light. He gave a scrambling sort of jump to see if he could go any higher, and all that happened was that he bounced sluggishly over towardsthe window. It was such a splendid feeling that he bounced himself again and went jogging slowly towards Johnny’s bed.
    “Yippee!” he said, and began to laugh.
    He invented a kind of dance then, by jumping with both feet together first to one side and then to the other. Bounce and… Bounce and… His head swung, his hair flew, and he brandished the tube in his hand. Bounce and… Bounce and… “Yippee!”
    Johnny and Gwinny came soberly and mournfully into the room while he was doing it. For a moment they could not believe their eyes. Then Johnny hastily slammed the door shut.
    “I’ve found it!” said Caspar, bouncing away and waving the tube at them. “I’ve found it! It’s called Vol. pulv . and it works by itself. Yippee!” He suddenly felt himself becoming heavy again and was just in time to bounce himself over to his bed before the powder stopped working and he came down with a flop that made the bedsprings jangle. He sat there laughing and waving the tube at the others.
    “How marvellous!” said Gwinny. “You are clever, Caspar.”
    Johnny came slowly over to the bed. He took the tube and looked at it. “I was going to try this one today,” he said.
    Caspar looked up at his gloomy face and understood that Johnny, not unreasonably, was feeling how unfair it was that Caspar should discover the secret, when Johnny had worked so hard over it and had just been in dire trouble about the ink as well. “You still need to do a lotof work on it,” Caspar said tactfully. “I used it dry, and it ought to be mixed with water. You’ll have to work out the right proportions.”
    Johnny’s face brightened. “Yes,” he said. “And experiment to find out how much you need, not to go soaring right out of the atmosphere. I’ll have to do tests on myself, bit by bit.”
    “That’s right,” agreed Caspar. “But for goodness sake don’t use too much while you do it. The tube’s less than half full already.”
    “I’ve got eyes,” Johnny said crossly. Then, feeling he was being rather ungracious, he added, “I’m the Great Scientist. I think of everything.”
    He tried to make good his boast by fencing off a corner of the room, so that no accidents should happen while the experiments were in progress. For the rest of the evening he sat in this pen, carefully putting the powder, grain by grain, into a test tube of water, and then bathing his big toe with the result.
    “What’s the matter with Johnny?” their mother wanted to know, when she came in around bedtime.
    Johnny, by this time, was bobbing an inch or so from the floor. He took hold of a chair that was part of his fence to hold himself down, and pretended not to have heard.
    “I knocked over one of his experiments this afternoon,” Caspar explained anxiously, “and he doesn’t want anybody to do it again. Be careful of him. He’s very angry.”
    Sally gave Johnny a puzzled look. “All right, darling. I won’t interfere. It was you I wanted to talk to anyway, Caspar.”
    “About what I said about Jack? I’m sorry,” Caspar said hurriedly, dreading a scene. Scenes with his mother were always painful, not because she scolded, but because she believed in absolute honesty.
    Sure enough, she said, “That’s not quite the point, darling. I could see you were hurt and miserable, and it upset me. Can’t you bring yourself to like Jack a little better? He really is very nice, you know.”
    “Why should I? He doesn’t like us,” Caspar retorted with equal honesty.
    “He tries,” Sally said earnestly. “I can think of at least a hundred occasions when he’s been very forebearing indeed.”
    “There are about a thousand when he hasn’t,” Caspar said bitterly.
    “That’s partly because you’ve been so awful,” Sally said