The Ogre of Oglefort by Eva Ibbotson

be done there, of course,” he said when he and the Hag met again on the bridge on their way back. “The trees need thinning out, old wood has to be cut away—but it’s a real forest, not silly rows of Christmas trees waiting to be felled. If only my brother were still alive . . . There’s an oak there that must be five hundred years old.” He shook his head sadly. Here was man’s work, work for a lifetime, not wheeling trolleys up and down hospital corridors. “Well it can’t be helped,” he went on. “We’ve got a few weeks, so we’d better make the most of them.”
    Dr. Brainsweller was in the garden, picking interesting herbs which might be useful for magic potions, and thinking about his childhood. It seemed to him that he had not really had much of a childhood at all. When he was a little boy he had wanted to be like other children—he did not feel called to wizardry and magic in any way—but his mother had put him in for every single wizardry competition and had got him the best tutors in the dark arts that she could find.
    But now, as he bent down and gathered up a bunch of dandelion leaves, he couldn’t help thinking that it had not really been worthwhile. In his workshop at Whipple Road he had tried to make gold from ordinary metal, and all that had happened was that he had burned a hole in the ceiling. He had tried to make an elixir which would make people live forever, and it had only given the people he tried it on a stomachache. And anyway, thought the wizard, bending down to pick a bunch of chives, was it really a good idea that people should live forever and get creaking bones and have to have hearing aids in their ears which whistled and honked?
    And he had to admit that he had been a failure as a warrior. When they charged into the Great Hall, meaning to slay the ogre, he had been muttering every spell he could think of for destroying things—the smiting spell, the thrusting spell, the spell to make a man drop dead—and it hadn’t seemed to make the slightest difference.
    Was he doing the right thing with his life? Not that it mattered—there wasn’t anything else he could do.
    He had come on a patch of spring onions behind the broken greenhouse, and though he had never used spring onions in a potion before, he thought they looked rather nice. Then he plucked a young shoot from a vine and found a radish under a broken cloche.
    The radish with its bright red coloring cheered up his little bunch, and he returned to the kitchen to try and see what he could do. Since he no longer had a workshop he had taken over a corner of the kitchen, and he went there now and fetched a wooden bowl and started to mix up what he had found.
    He was turning the leaves over and over when he realized that it had happened again. There was a sound like the soughing of the wind, and then as the mist cleared, he saw it. His mother’s face was looking down on him—and her expression was one of horror.
    â€œBri-Bri, what are you
doing
?” she began. “You’re supposed to be a
wizard
.”
    And then this odd thing happened again. Two very large spiders came hurrying across the ceiling, and as they did so their webs swung out from a rafter and completely covered Mrs. Brainsweller’s face in a mass of cobwebby lace. She could be heard getting fainter and fainter and then she gave up, and her long worried face and spectacles disappeared.
    The wizard looked up, meaning to thank the spiders, but they had already scuttled away, leaving the webs hanging on the rafter.
    When the Hag returned she found Dr. Brainsweller staring down at a bowl full of mixed leaves and looking very shaken.
    â€œWhat is it, Brian?” she asked him. “You look upset.”
    The wizard explained, and the Hag, who was feeling uplifted after her time in the Dribble, did her best to comfort him.
    â€œShe’s just worried about you,”