The Pebble-Sellers

I rounded the corner from Main Road into the deserted Bull Baulk. It was mid-afternoon on one of the hottest days in the year. I could see a couple of children on the pavement some 50 yards away. At a guess, a boy of 7 and a girl of 5. As I got nearer I could see that the boy was holding up a sign; well, a piece of cardboard on which he had written the word "Please". 

I wondered if they had something they hoped they could sell me; home-made scones perhaps, or books they no longer needed. Sure enough! On a nearly empty tray they had 4 or 5 pebbles each of which, as  they pointed out, had been 'decorated' with a black felt-tip marker. 

"Fifty pence each" said the little girl. "We have sold all those already". She gestured to the tray's emptiness.

Fifty pence seemed quite a high price to my ancient brain, but my eye was taken by a smooth, flattened, stone on which one or other, the boy or the girl, had written in uneven black letters: 

Have

a

Good

Day

I picked it up. It fitted snugly in the palm of my hand. It felt nice. The sentiment seemed genuine. A wave of generosity welled up inside me and I decided I would buy. The girl jumped a little two-footed jump of excitement. But "Oh!" I had no money; only my Debit Card. 

"Never mind" I said, "It is not too far to my house. I shall come back in a quarter of an hour and if you are still here and it is still for sale I shall buy it then. But why don't you wait in the shade." For the sun was still hot at four in the afternoon. 

Indeed, it was a stiflingly hot day, in spite of two ferocious claps of thunder. The first had startled me into rushing out to the street to see if a crane had fallen off a low-loader; the second a synchronous flash-bang exploded right in my face. But little rain had fallen. 

My cool, well-curtained, house welcomed me in from the heat. Fortunately I found a fifty-pence piece. I also picked from my own collection of pebbles a small piece of mid-jurassic limestone for I though the children might enjoy the 180-million-year-old fossils. "Older than the dinosaurs" my little grand-daughter had told her astonished schoolmates in Brookline, Massachusetts. And out I went again, into the heat.

My two little pebble-sellers were still there, still out in the sun. They were delighted with my coin which they put in a small box, already containing two others. And I gave them my lump of fossilised shell-fish, explaining its age. "Gosh! Older than me!" said the boy. 

Back home I put my little 'wishing-stone' in the pebble bowl on the kitchen windowsill. I felt pleased with my purchase. It smiled back at me: "Have a Good Day".