Free Mary Poppins Comes Back by P. L. Travers Page B

away again, turning gracefully, with a very sad look on his face, through the air.
    Suddenly he stopped but in a very curious position. Instead of being right-side up he was upside down and standing on his head.
    "Dear, dear!" said Mr. Turvy, giving a fierce kick with his feet, "Dear, dear!"
    But his feet would not go down to the floor. They remained waving gently in the air.
    "Well," Mr. Turvy remarked in his melancholy voice. "I suppose I should be glad it's no worse. This is certainly better—though not
much
better—than hanging outside in the rain with nothing to sit on and no overcoat. You see," he looked at Jane and Michael, "I want so much to be right-side up and so—just my luck!—I'm upside down. Well, well, never mind. I ought to be used to it by now. I've had forty-five years of it. Give me the Bowl."
    Michael ran and took the Bowl from Mary Poppins and put it on the floor by Mr. Turvy's head. And as he did so he felt a curious thing happening to him. The floor seemed to be pushing his feet away from it and tilting them into the air.
    "Oh!" he cried. "I feel so funny. Something most extraordinary is happening to me!"
    For by now he, too, was turning Catherine wheels through the air, and flying up and down the room until he landed head-first on the floor beside Mr. Turvy.
    "Strike me pink!" said Mr. Turvy in a surprised voice, looking at Michael out of the corner of his eye. "I never knew it was catching. You, too? Well, of all the—Hi! Hi, I say! Steady there! You'll knock the goods off the shelves, if you're not careful, and I shall be charged for breakages. What
are
you doing?"
    He was now addressing Jane whose feet had suddenly swept off the carpet and were turning above her head in the giddiest manner. Over and over she went—first her head and then her feet in the air—until at last she came down on the other side of Mr. Turvy and found herself standing on her head.
    "You know," said Mr. Turvy staring at her solemnly. "This is all very odd. I never knew it to happen to any one else before. Upon my word, I never did. I do hope you don't mind."
    Jane laughed, turning her head towards him and waving her legs in the air.
    "Not a bit, thank you. I've always wanted to stand on my head and I've never been able to do it before. It's very comfortable."
    "H'm," said Mr. Turvy dolefully. "I'm glad somebody likes it. I can't say
I
feel like that."
    "I do," said Michael. "I wish I could stay like this all my life. Everything looks so nice and different."
    And, indeed, everything
was
different. From their strange position on the floor Jane and Michael could see that the articles on the carpenter's bench were all upside down—china dogs, broken dolls, wooden stools—all standing on their heads.
    "Look!" whispered Jane to Michael. He turned his head as much as he could. And there, creeping out of a hole in the wainscoting, came a small mouse. It skipped, head over heels, into the middle of the room and, turning upside down, balanced daintily on its nose in front of them.
    They watched it for a moment, very surprised. Then Michael suddenly said, "Jane, look out of the window!"
    She turned her head carefully for it was rather difficult and saw to her astonishment that everything outside the room, as well as everything in it, was different. Out in the street the houses were standing on their heads, their chimneys on the pavement and their door-steps in the air and out of the door-steps came little curls of smoke. In the distance a church had turned turtle and was balancing rather top-heavily on the point of its steeple. And the rain, which had always seemed to them to come down from the sky, was pouring up from the earth in a steady soaking shower.
    "Oh," said Jane. "How beautifully strange it all is! It's like being in another world. I'm so glad we came to-day."
    "Well," said Mr. Turvy, mournfully, "you're very kind, I must say. You do know how to make allowances. Now, what about this Bowl?"
    He stretched out his hand