There are clever people in the world and people who are not so clever and people who are quite silly. And in a city like Edinburgh there are, of course, all three kinds: the bright, clever ones, the less clever ones, and the really silly sort. But there was once upon a time a city called Gotham, and this city was famous, because all the people who lived there were silly. You will see how willy they were from the story I am going to tell you.

One day the men of that city were talking among themselves and they said, "All other cities have a town-hall—that means a big house where the wise men of the town come together and they decide about roads and buildings and lights, et cetera. All other cities have such a big house, a town-hall, and they are proud of their town-hall, only we in Gotham haven't got one! But why shouldn't we have one too? Let's all work together and we will build such a town-hall for Gotham amd it shall be such a big house that all the other cities will envy us!"

And really, the men of Gotham got together and they worked for weeks and months carrying bricks and putting them one upon the other until they had four great walls up. Then they made roof tiles and they climbed high up on ladders and put the tiles on the rafters and made a roof. And when it was ll finished they were very proud of their work. It really was a very big house they had built and everybody could see it was a fine house. And then the men of Gotham walked into the big house they had built and they discovered there was something wrong with it, because inside it was pitch dark and one could not see anything and they bumped into each other. It was pitch dark because, although they had built the walls and made a roof, they had forgotten to make any windows in the walls.

But the men of Gotham just did not think of windows and they wondered and wondered why it was so dark in their town-hall. And they walked out into the street again, still wondering. Then one of them said, "Look at all this bright sunshine out here! If we could get some of this sunlight into the house, it wouldn't be dark there, would it?" And then another man cried out, "I've got an idea! Let's catch the sunlight in sacks and then we carry the sacks into the house and open them; the sunlight will come out of the sacks and we shall have it nice and bright inside!" They all cried, "Hurray! That's what we shall do!" So they all ran home and they came back with sacks and they held them open to catch the sunlight and when they thought the sacks were full they tied the top of the sacks very fast so that no light should get out. And then they carried the sacks into the big house and they said, "Amazing how little weight these sacks have! They are full of sunlight but they are so easy to carry, as if there were nothing in them!" Then they got into the house and they stumbled about in the darkness, but they opened the bags to let the light out, but the inside stayed dark as it was before, and so they thought, "Perhaps we haven't got the right sacks to catch the sunlight."

So they still did not know what to do to have light in their town-hall. Then a stranger, a man from another city, happened to travel through Gotham. He saw how worried