"They seem to spend their silly little lives getting in each other's way," said the eldest boy. "Rights and laws and regulations and rascalities: it's like a game of spellicans. . . . Well anyhow, they'll have to live in their grubby dirty silly little houses for a bit longer. It's very evident we can't go on with this."
And the Cossar children left that great house unfinished, a mere hole of foundations and the beginning of a wall, and sulked back to their big enclosure. After a time the hole was filled with water and with stagnation, and weeds and vermin; and the Food, either dropped there by the sons of Cossar or blowing thither as dust, set growth going in its usual fashion. Water voles came out over the country and did infinite havoc, and one day a farmer caught his pigs drinking there, and instantly and with great presence of mind—for he knew of the great hog of Oakham—slew them all. And from that deep pool it was the mosquitoes came, quite terrible mosquitoes, whose only virtue was that the sons of Cossar, after being bitten for a little, could stand it no longer, and chose a moonlight night when law and order were abed, and drained the water clean away into the river by Brook.
But they left the big weeds and the big water voles and all sorts of big undesirable things still living and breeding on the site they had chosen, the site on which the fair great house of the little people might have towered to heaven. . . .
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