They went to the shops and bought some groceries to last Percy the rest of his visit. Then they walked further into the eastern streets of Wahroonga, while Percy was recalling the dream he had enjoyed. The East Wahroonga shops made him think of the cake shop in the dream. They came to some Maltese gardens. Percy thought they were a type of garden that people could buy to go with their houses. He did not know of the existence of Malta and its people. A further trip around an additional block brought them to a quiet park with a few lemon trees and mandarin trees in it.

It was an exceptionally calm and sunny day. Percy felt no difficulty in suppressing his boyhood enthusiasm for physical activity as the two of them sat on a four person swing, with a footrest in the centre of it, and gently swung back and forth. They absorbed the view of the park, seated opposite each other on the swing.

When they arrived back at 66 Burnseid Street, the memory of the swing in the park was still in their minds. It gave his grandmother an idea of a way to occupy the young boy while she prepared his lunch. She led him down to the large tree on the grass beyond the loop at the inner end of the driveway. At the top of the tree, the branches curled out and downwards in order to act as a semi-solid wall around the area surrounding the foot of the tree. Two feet up from the base of the tree, two branches grew horizontally out of the tree almost side by side.

"Percy," said his grandmother, helping him onto one of the branches, "You can have a swing on these tree horses while I make lunch."

From that day onwards, that part of the garden was referred to simply as "the tree horses."

After a relaxing session on the tree horses, Percy decided to climb the tree. He managed to reach the fourth branch up from the tree horse branches, and found that he could climb no further because he was not tall enough to reach the next branch. He made his way down to the tree horses and saw his grandmother waiting with a tray at the bottom.

"Would you like to have your ham salad and biscuits on the tree horse?" she asked him, "and then we can go back up to the dining room for some cake afterwards."

By the time all of this had been taken care of, Percy's grandmother had grown weary of the day's activities and needed to have an afternoon snooze. Percy filled in the time watching television, until his grandfather came home and started to play billiards in the room at the end of the western downstairs hallway, which was also the room with the screen for viewing the travel films.

"Why are you hitting the balls into the holes?" asked Percy, who wanted to see all of his favourite colours on the table, "You can pack them up later."

"That's the idea of the game," said his grandfather, "I'll sink the pink next."

"But there isn't a pink one. There's only blue, black, orange, yellow, brown, green, white and some red ones."

"The orange one's called the pink," said Percy's grandfather, which prompted Percy to reconsider everything that his infants schoolteachers had taught him about the colour wheel.

"Oh, not quite," said his grandfather, when he failed to get the pink billiard ball to fall into the pocket.

Percy felt sympathy for his grandfather. He was too young to be allowed to touch the long sticks with the blue points, but he wanted to help his grandfather to battle these objectionable, round, coloured balls.

After a brief search under the billiard table, he found an empty cardboard tube which had once been the packaging container for a sixty watt light globe. Percy picked it up and said, "This is my gun."

He waited until the next time his grandfather met with failure on the billiard table.

"That one's being naughty," said Percy, in reference to the brown ball, "I'll shoot it to teach it to go in next time."

His grandfather appeared to be encouraged by this particular manifestation of the sports world's concept of a team effort, and continued to sink the billiard balls, pausing occasionally to allow Percy a chance to administer his own unique brand of justice to any billiard balls whose paths of motion appeared to oppose his goals of sinking them.

This occupied the two of them until dinner time, after which Percy and his grandmother went to the living room to play cards.

"Can we go for another rosy lights walk?" he asked.

"No. You had better stay inside tonight. You don't want to have any more nasty dreams, do you?"

They enjoyed several rounds of snap, during which Percy's snapping techniques increased in velocity and intensity.

"Good grief Percy! The way you're snapping them up, it's more like a karate chop than a game of cards!" laughed his grandmother.

Percy responded by bursting out laughing. Then they calmed down and enjoyed a quiet game of whist, and Percy occasionally stared around at the objects in the room, the protective closed curtain by the window next to the front door, the grand piano, the mantelpiece, the opening to the western downstairs hallway and the staircase, the doorway to the downstairs bathroom, the couch, the doorway to the telephone room, the doorway to the dining room, and the special cabinet, one part of which opened up to reveal a mirror-walled drinks cabinet room, and another part which acted as a glass windowed display case for several small china jungle animals, of which Percy's favourites were the pink elephants.

Eventually it was time for bed, and the exhausted young boy planned to exhaust himself still further before morning. He went to one of the three upstairs bathrooms to have a quick bath before bed, and enjoyed watching the warm water flow out of the red fish's mouth which was in fact the tap built into the bath itself. Percy enjoyed the atmosphere of his grandparents' bathrooms, because they all had colourful bathtubs and small red and yellow and green square floor tiles each about two inches wide.

When he got to his bed, Percy pretended to fall asleep, and then stole downstairs fully dressed, with a torch in his hand, and crept out into the garden and made his way to the streets. He walked to Wahroonga Station in search of an adventure which would surpass any of the holiday's activities so far experienced.

As he was reaching the far end of the footpath which ran alongside Wahroonga Park, he heard a series of voices coming from within the park. He slipped his torch into his pocket and crept into the bushes, getting down on all fours, thinking "Down, down, down, into a bush."

When he reached the other side of the bush, he looked into the park to see about thirty people, mostly adults sitting, talking, some of them humming pleasant tunes on the grass and on the park seats and tables. The girls and ladies wore light pink and white coloured dresses, and some of them had red and pink coloured stones in their hair. The boys and men wore either dinner suits or top hats and tails.

"Hey! A spy!" called one of the men, who had seen Percy.

A lady accompanied the man who had noticed him.

"Down, down, down, into a bush!" thought Percy, again diving into the thick bush at the edge of the park, surrounding himself with leaves and flowers. Had it been spring instead of the beginning of winter, he could have surrounded himself with many more flowers. He saw the lady and the man approaching his bush. The lady looked friendly, and Percy decided that, although he was a little frightened of the bellowing man, he was intrigued, and wanted to meet these unusual people who sat in a park with food and lanterns and drinks in the early hours of the morning. Percy crawled out and revealed himself.

"He spies on us!" bellowed the man.

"Oh Aygin, be civil. He's only a harmless boy," said the lady.

The man eventually took off his top hat, bowed and shook Percy's hand. The girls and boys showed Percy a book explaining some of their customs and habits. After a couple of hours of eating, drinking, singing and talking with these people, Percy was confronted with a farewell speech from the lady who had located his bush:
"We come from far far away, and your people would find us unusual, but thank you for being our friend, young boy. Now you must go home to bed before your grandparents awaken and become concerned about your disappearance."

Percy somehow knew that he had to obey them.

*          *          *          *

He went to sleep, and dreamt of the beautiful lady who had come to his rescue. In the dream, she lived alone in a house a few blocks from his Grandmother’s place, and was having an evening party out in her back garden for her female friends. He had somehow snuck into her garden at night at tiny size and discovered the party from the edge of the garden. She had seen him, and come striding towards him, laughing, and reached for him. It had been even more enjoyable than his memories of the actual encounter, if it had been an encounter.

The next morning, Friday he woke up, having had only two hours of sleep from four until six. He wondered whether or not it had been a dream.

No.

It had all happened.

It was true.

He knew it.

His grandmother agreed to an unexplained request to walk to Wahroonga Park; and did not notice the way he stared around the park, even into garbage bins, to find no evidence of their having been there, but they had.

They had all been there. He has not seen them again, to this day, but he always remembered the night when he had set out on an adventure and uttered his safety phrase, "Down, down, down, into a bush," and enjoyed an unusual but brief friendship with the Wanderers of Wahroonga. He remembered the beautiful lady and wished he could have been shrunken for her.