Headscratchers / Five Children and It

• According to the Psammead, most of the children's wishes (like being beautiful as the day) are "too fanciful" to turn into stone, as wishes did back in the Good Old Prehistoric Days. He relates an anecdote of a little boy who wished for wings, which turned to stone at the end of the day and sent him crashing onto a stone winged lion ("what with his stone wings and the lion's stone wings—"). Yet the children's wings simply vanish at the end of the day. And when the kids wish for a gravel pit full of gold coins, the coins likewise vanish rather than turn into millions of stone coins.
  • Three possible explanations for this: either the Psammead is trolling them about the turning-to-stone part, the Psammead is trolling them about wishes ending at sunset (since one of the gold guineas does last after sundown), or since his powers aren't what they used to be, the objects simply don't have enough magic to turn to stone and instead disappear.
  • As for the coins disappearing, one might suspect that the Psammead realized he'd be under those millions of stone coins at the end of the day...except he appears to have been just fine spending the day under millions of gold coins, which would be just as heavy.