Harold the Broomstick was crippled, he stumbled as he flew, sometimes he dropped a score of feet, and span.  He did stunts by mistake.

They had not strength enough between them to get home.  They made a forced landing in the silver loneliness of Kensington Gardens.  It was a fortunate place, for there is much magic there.  Wherever there are children who pretend, there grows a little magic in the air, and therefore the wind of Kensington Gardens thrills with enchantment, and the Round Pond, full of much pretence of great Armadas, crossed and re-crossed with the abiding wakes of ships full of treasure and romance, is a blessed lake to magic people.

The witch bathed Harold, her broomstick, in the Round Pond.  He evidently felt its healing quality at once, for after the first minute of immersion, he swam about exultantly, and shook drops full of moonlight out of his mane.

The bugles sounded All-clear in many keys all round the ear’s horizon; their sound matched the waning moonlight.

The witch bathed her shoulder, and then she found her way to a little quiet place she knew of, where no park-keeper ever looks, a place where secret and ungardened daffodils grow in springtime, a place where all the mice and birds play unafraid, because no cat can find the way thither.  You can see the Serpentine from that place, and the bronze shadows under its bridge, but no houses, and no railways, and no signs of London.

Here the witch made a little fire, and leaned three sticks together over it; she lighted the fire with her finger-tip and hung over it the little patent folding cauldron, which she always carried on a chatelaine swinging from her belt.  And she made a charm of daisy-heads, and spring-smelling grasses, and the roots of unappreciated weeds, and the mosses that cover the tiny faery cliffs of the Serpentine.  Over the mixture she shook out the contents of one of her little paper packets of magic.  All this she boiled over her fire for many hours, sitting beside it in the silver darkness, with her knees drawn up and her hands clasped in front of them.  The trees sprang up into the moonlight like dark fountains from the pools of their own shadows.  Little shreds of cloud flowed wonderfully across the sky.  There was no sound except the sound of the water, like an uncertain player upon a little instrument.  The charm was still unfinished when the dawn passed over London, and the sun came up, the seed of another day, sown in a rich red soil.  The trees of the Gardens remembered their daylight shadows again, and forgot their mystery.  The water-birds, after examining their shoulder-blades with minute care for some moments, launched themselves upon a lake of diamonds.  There seemed a veil of mist and bird-song over the world.  The sudden song of the birds was like finding the hearing of one’s heart restored, after long deafness.