第 5 页

lasso. Seeing the shocked look on Harry's face, Ron added, "It doesn't

hurt them - you've just got to make them really dizzy so they can't find

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their way back to the gnomeholes."

He let go of the gnome's ankles: It flew twenty feet into the air and

landed with a thud in the field over the hedge.

"Pitiful," said Fred. "I bet I can get mine beyond that stump."

Harry learned quickly not to feel too sorry for the gnomes. He decided

just to drop the first one he caught over the hedge, but the gnome,

sensing weakness, sank its razor-sharp teeth into Harry's finger and he

had a hard job shaking it off - until

"Wow, Harry - that must've been fifty feet ......

The air was soon thick with flying gnomes.

"See, they're not too bright," said George, seizing five or six gnomes at

once. "The moment they know the de-gnoming's going on they storm

up to have a look. You'd think they'd have learned by now just to stay

put."

Soon, the crowd of gnomes in the field started walking away in a

straggling line, their little shoulders hunched.

"They'll be back," said Ron as they watched the gnomes disappear into

the hedge on the other side of the field. "They love it here .... Dad's

too soft with them; he thinks they're funny . . . ."

Just then, the front door slammed.

"He's back!" said George. "Dad's home!"

They hurried through the garden and back into the house.

Mr. Weasley was slumped in a kitchen chair with his glasses off and

his eyes closed. He was a thin man, going bald, but the little hair he

had was as red as any of his children's. He was wearing long green

robes, which were dusty and travel-worn.

"What a night," he mumbled, groping for the teapot as they all sat

down around him. "Nine raids. Nine! And old Mundungus Fletcher

tried to put a hex on me when I had my back turned ......

33

Mr. Weasley took a long gulp of tea and sighed.

"Find anything, Dad?" said Fred eagerly.

"All I got were a few shrinking door keys and a biting kettle," yawned

Mr. Weasley. "There was some pretty nasty stuff that wasn't my

department, though. Mortlake was taken away for questioning about

some extremely odd ferrets, but that's the Committee on Experimental

Charms, thank goodness ......

"Why would anyone bother making door keys shrink?" said George.

"Just Muggle-baiting," sighed Mr. Weasley. "Sell them a key that

keeps shrinking to nothing so they can never find it when they need it

.... Of course, it's very hard to convict anyone because no Muggle

would admit their key keeps shrinking - they'll insist they just keep

losing it. Bless them, they'll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if

it's staring them in the face .... But the things our lot have taken to

enchanting, you wouldn't believe -"

"LIKE CARS, FOR INSTANCE?"

Mrs. Weasley had appeared, holding a long poker like a sword. Mr.

Weasley's eyes jerked open. He stared guiltily at his wife.

"C-cars, Molly, dear?"

"Yes, Arthur, cars," said Mrs. Weasley, her eyes flashing. "Imagine a

wizard buying a rusty old car and telling his wife all he wanted to do

with it was take it apart to see how it worked, while really he was

enchanting it to make it fly."

Mr. Weasley blinked.

"Well, dear, I think you'll find that he would be quite within the law to

do that, even if - er - he maybe would have done better to, um, tell his

wife the truth .... There's a loophole in the law, you'll find .... As long

as he wasn't intending to fly the car, the fact that the car could fly

wouldn't -"

"Arthur Weasley, you made sure there was a loophole when you

34

wrote that law!" shouted Mrs. Weasley. "Just so you could carry on

tinkering with all that Muggle rubbish in your shed! And for your

information, Harry arrived this morning in the car you weren't

intending to fly!"

"Harry?" said Mr. Weasley blankly. "Harry who?"

He looked around, saw Harry, and jumped.

"Good lord, is it Harry Potter? Very pleased to meet you, Ron's told us

so much about -"

"Your sons flew that car to Harry's house and back last night."

shouted Mrs. Weasley. "What have you got to say about that, eh?"

"Did you really?" said Mr. Weasley eagerly. "Did it go all right? I - I

mean," he faltered as sparks flew from Mrs. Weasley's eyes, "that

that was very wrong, boys - very wrong indeed ......

"Let's leave them to it," Ron muttered to Harry as Mrs. Weasley

swelled like a bullfrog. "Come on, I'll show you my bedroom."

They slipped out of the kitchen and down a narrow passageway to an

uneven staircase, which wound its way, zigzagging up

through the house. On the third landing, a door stood ajar. Harry just

caught sight of a pair of bright brown eyes staring at him before it

closed with a snap.

"Ginny," said Ron. "You don't know how weird it is for her to be this

shy. She never shuts up normally -"

They climbed two more flights until they reached a door with peeling

paint and a small plaque on it, saying RONALD'S ROOM.

Harry stepped in, his head almost touching the sloping ceiling, and

blinked. It was like walking into a furnace: Nearly everything in Ron's

room seemed to be a violent shade of orange: the bedspread, the

walls, even the ceiling. Then Harry realized that Ron had covered

nearly every inch of the shabby wallpaper with posters of the same

seven witches and wizards, all wearing bright orange robes, carrying

35

broomsticks, and waving energetically.

"Your Quidditch team?" said Harry.

"The Chudley Cannons," said Ron, pointing at the orange bedspread,

which was emblazoned with two giant black C's and a speeding

cannonball. "Ninth in the league."

Ron's school spellbooks were stacked untidily in a corner, next to a

pile of comics that all seemed to feature The Adventures of Martin

Miggs, the Mad Muggle. Ron's magic wand was lying on top of a fish

tank full of frog spawn on the windowsill, next to his fat gray rat,

Scabbers, who was snoozing in a patch of sun.

Harry stepped over a pack of Self-Shuffling playing cards on the floor

and looked out of the tiny window. In the field far below he could see

a gang of gnomes sneaking one by one back through the Weasleys'

hedge. Then he turned to look at Ron, who was watching him almost

nervously, as though waiting for his opinion.

"It's a bit small," said Ron quickly. "Not like that room you had

with the Muggles. And I'm right underneath the ghoul in the attic;

he's always banging on the pipes and groaning ......

But Harry, grinning widely, said, "This is the best house I've ever

been in."

Ron's ears went pink. .

C H4 A P T E R V O U R

AT F L 0 V RR 11 $ H

AND BLOTTS

ife at the Burrow was as different as possible from life on Privet

Drive. The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasleys'

house burst with the strange and unexpected. Harry got a shock the

first time he looked in the mirror over the kitchen mantelpiece and it

shouted, "Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!" The ghoul in the attic howled

and dropped pipes whenever he felt things were getting too quiet, and

small explosions from Fred and George's bedroom were considered

perfectly normal. What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron's,

however, wasn't the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul: It was the

fact that everybody there seemed to like him.

36

Mrs. Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and tried to force him

to eat fourth helpings at every meal. Mr. Weasley liked Harry to sit

next to him at the dinner table so that he could bombard him with

questions about life with Muggles, asking him to explain how things

like plugs and the postal service worked.

"Fascinating." he would say as Harry talked him through using a

telephone. "Ingenious, really, how many ways Muggles have found of

getting along without magic."

Harry heard from Hogwarts one sunny morning about a week after he

had arrived at the Burrow. He and Ron went down to breakfast to find

Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and Ginny already sitting at the kitchen table.

The moment she saw Harry, Ginny accidentally knocked her porridge

bowl to the floor with a loud clatter. Ginny seemed very prone to

knocking things over whenever Harry entered a room. She dived under

the table to retrieve the bowl and emerged with her face glowing like

the setting sun. Pretending he hadn't noticed this, Harry sat down and

took the toast Mrs. Weasley offered him.

"Letters from school," said Mr. Weasley, passing Harry and Ron

identical envelopes of yellowish parchment, addressed in green ink.

"Dumbledore already knows you're here, Harry - doesn't miss a trick,

that man. You two've got them, too," he added, as Fred and George

ambled in, still in their pajamas.

For a few minutes there was silence as they all read their letters.

Harry's told him to catch the Hogwarts Express as usual from King's

Cross station on September first. There was also a list of the new

books he'd need for the coming year.

SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS WILL REQUIRE:

The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 2

by Miranda Goshawk

37

Break with a Banshee by Gilderoy Lockhart

Gadding with Ghouls by Gilderoy Lockhart

Holidays with Hags by Gilderoy Lockhart

4 ",3

Travels with Trolls by Gilderoy Lockhart

Voyages with Vampires by Gilderoy Lockhart

Wanderings with Werewolves by Gilderoy Lockhart

Year with the Yeti by Gilderoy Lockhart

Fred, who had finished his own list, peered over at Harry's.

"You've been told to get all Lockhart's books, too!" he said. "The new

Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher must be a fan - bet it's a

witch."

At this point, Fred caught his mother's eye and quickly busied himself

with the marmalade.

"That lot won't come cheap," said George, with a quick look at his

parents. "Lockhart's books are really expensive ......

"Well, we'll manage," said Mrs. Weasley, but she looked worried. "I

expect we'll be able to pick up a lot of Ginny's things secondhand."

"Oh, are you starting at Hogwarts this year?" Harry asked Ginny.

She nodded, blushing to the roots of her flaming hair, and put her

elbow in the butter dish. Fortunately no one saw this except Harry,

because just then Ron's elder brother Percy walked in. He was

already dressed, his Hogwarts prefect badge pinned to his sweater

vest.

"Morning, all," said Percy briskly. "Lovely day."

He sat down in the only remaining chair but leapt up again almost

immediately, pulling from underneath him a moulting, gray feather

duster - at least, that was what Harry thought it was, until he saw that

it was breathing.

* 44

38

"Errol!" said Ron, taking the limp owl from Percy and extracting a

letter from under its wing. "Finally - he's got Hermione's answer. I

wrote to her saying we were going to try and rescue you from the

Dursleys."

He carried Errol to a perch just inside the back door and tried to

stand him on it, but Errol flopped straight off again so Ron lay him on

the draining board instead, muttering, "Pathetic." Then he ripped

open Hermione's letter and read it out loud:

"`Dear Ron, and Harry if you're there,

"`I hope everything went all right and that Harry is okay and that

you didn't do anything illegal to get him out, Ron, because that would

get Harry into trouble, too. I've been really worried and if Harry is all

right, will you please let me know at once, but perhaps it would be bet

ter if you used a different owl because I think another delivery might

finish your one off.

"'I'm very busy with schoolwork, of course'- How can she be?" said Ron

in horror. "We're on vacation! - 'and we're going to London next

Wednesday to buy my new books. Why don't we meet in Diago n Alley?

"`Let me know what's happening as soon as you can. Love from Hermione.

"'

"Well, that fits in nicely, we can go and get all your things then, too,"

said Mrs. Weasley, starting to clear the table. "What're you all up to

today?"

Harry, Ron, Fred, and George were planning to go up the hill to a

small paddock the Weasleys owned. It was surrounded by trees that

blocked it from view of the village below, meaning that they could

practice Quidditch there, as long as they didn't fly too high.

* 4$

They couldn't use real Quidditch balls, which would have been hard to

explain if they had escaped and flown away over the village; instead

they threw apples for one another to catch. They took turns riding

Harry's Nimbus Two Thousand, which was easily the best broom;

39

Ron's old Shooting Star was often outstripped by passing butterflies.

Five minutes later they were marching up the hill, broomsticks over

their shoulders. They had asked Percy if he wanted to join them, but

he had said he was busy. Harry had only seen Percy at mealtimes so

far; he stayed shut in his room the rest of the time.

"Wish I knew what he was up to," said Fred, frowning. "He's not

himself. His exam results came the day before you did; twelve