Some children were building castles on the sands. Amongst the number was a little boy called Jack, and his voice could almost always be heard above the rest.

“Oh, look!” he cried, “look, Mabel, you are doing it badly! Why, it’s all crooked; you’ll have to begin again,” and leaving poor Mabel, whose face clouded with disappointment, he turned to a boy called Cedric.

“My word, Ceddie,” he said, “you don’t know how to build castles! why, yours looks like a church with a spire—you ought to make a round tower. And just look at stupid Ella! She’s hardly begun yet, and doesn’t know a bit how to do it.” And all this time Jack’s castle was getting bigger and bigger, and though he thought he was doing it very cleverly, really it was not like a castle at all. He was so busy finding fault with his playmates that he had no time to think how to do his own work properly. At last the other children grew so tired of his grumbling that they took no more notice of him, and he had to play alone until his nurse took him in to dinner. As soon as he had gone they all ran to look at his castle.

“Why, it isn’t any more right than ours,” they cried, and in two minutes they knocked it all down.

When Jack came out to play in the afternoon he cried because his castle had been spoiled.