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lasso. Seeing the shocked look on Harry’s face, Ron added, ‘It doesn’t hurt them - you’ve just got to make them really dizzy so they can’t find their way back to the gnomeholes.’
    He let go of the gnome’s ankles: it flew twenty feet into the air and landed with a thud in the field over the hedge.
    ‘Pitiful,’ said Fred. ‘I bet I can get mine beyond that stump.’
    Harry learned quickly not to feel too sorry for the gnomes. He decided just to drop the first one he caught over the hedge, but the gnome, sensing weakness, sank its razor-sharp teeth into Harry’s finger and he had a hard job shaking it off until -
    ‘Wow, Harry - that must’ve been fifty feet …’
    The air was soon thick with flying gnomes.
    ‘See, they’re not too bright,’ said George, seizing five or six gnomes at once. ‘The moment they know the de-gnoming’s going on they storm up to have a look. You’d think they’d have learned by now just to stay put.’
    Soon, the crowd of gnomes in the field started walking away in a straggling line, their little shoulders hunched.
    ‘They’ll be back,’ said Ron, as they watched the gnomes disappear into the hedge on the other side of the field. ‘They love it here … Dad’s too soft with them, he thinks they’re funny …’
    Just then, the front door slammed.
    ‘He’s back!’ said George. ‘Dad’s home!’
    They hurried through the garden and back into the house.
    Mr Weasley was slumped in a kitchen chair with his glasses off and his eyes closed. He was a thin man, going bald, but the little hair he had was as red as any of his children’s. He was wearing long green robes which were dusty and travel-worn.
    ‘What a night,’ he mumbled, groping for the teapot as they all sat down around him. ‘Nine raids. Nine! And old Mundungus Fletcher tried to put a hex on me when I had my back turned …’
    Mr Weasley took a long gulp of tea and sighed.
    ‘Find anything, Dad?’ said Fred eagerly.
    ‘All I got were a few shrinking door-keys and a biting kettle,’ yawned Mr Weasley. ‘There was some pretty nasty stuff that wasn’t my department, though. Mortlake was taken away for questioning about some extremely odd ferrets, but that’s the Committee on Experimental Charms, thank goodness …’
    ‘Why would anyone bother making door-keys shrink?’ said George.
    ‘Just Muggle-baiting,’ sighed Mr Weasley. ‘Sell them a key that keeps shrinking to nothing so they can never find it when they need it … Of course, it’s very hard to convict anyone because no Muggle would admit their key keeps shrinking - they’ll insist they just keep losing it. Bless them, they’ll go to any lengths to ignore magic, even if it’s staring them in the face … but the things our lot have taken to enchanting, you wouldn’t believe -‘
    ‘LIKE CARS, FOR INSTANCE?’
    Mrs Weasley had appeared, holding a long poker like a sword. Mr Weasley’s eyes jerked open. He stared guiltily at his wife.
    ‘C-cars, Molly, dear?’
    ‘Yes, Arthur, cars,’ said Mrs Weasley, her eyes flashing. ‘Imagine a wizard buying a rusty old car and telling his wife all he wanted to do with it was take it apart to see how it worked, while really he was enchanting it to make it fly. ’
    Mr Weasley blinked.
    ‘Well, dear, I think you’ll find that he would be quite within the law to do that, even if, er, he maybe would have done better to, um, tell his wife the truth … There’s a loophole in the law, you’ll find … as long as he wasn’t intending to fly the car, the fact that the car could fly wouldn’t -‘
    ‘Arthur Weasley, you made sure there was a loophole when you wrote that law!’ shouted Mrs Weasley. ‘Just so you could carry on tinkering with all that Muggle rubbish in your shed! And for your information, Harry arrived this morning in the car you weren’t intending to fly!’
    ‘Harry?’ said Mr Weasley blankly. ‘Harry who?’
    He looked around, saw Harry and jumped.
    ‘Good Lord, is it