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Harry Potter? Very pleased to meet you, Ron’s told us so much about -‘
    ‘Your sons flew that car to Harry’s house and back last night!’ shouted Mrs Weasley. ‘What have you got to say about that, eh?’
    ‘Did you really?’ said Mr Weasley eagerly. ‘Did it go all right? I-I mean,’ he faltered, as sparks flew from Mrs Weasley’s eyes, ‘that-that was very wrong, boys - very wrong indeed …’
    ‘Let’s leave them to it,’ Ron muttered to Harry, as Mrs Weasley swelled like a bullfrog. ‘Come on, I’ll show you my bedroom.’
    They slipped out of the kitchen and down a narrow passageway to an uneven staircase, which zigzagged its way up through the house. On the third landing, a door stood ajar. Harry just caught sight of a pair of bright brown eyes staring at him before it closed with a snap.
    ‘Ginny,’ said Ron. ‘You don’t know how weird it is for her to be this shy, she never shuts up normally -‘
    They climbed two more flights until they reached a door with peeling paint and a small plaque on it, saying ‘Ronald’s Room’.
    Harry stepped in, his head almost touching the sloping ceiling, and blinked. It was like walking into a furnace: nearly everything in Ron’s room seemed to be a violent shade of orange: the bedspread, the walls, even the ceiling. Then Harry realised that Ron had covered nearly every inch of the shabby wallpaper with posters of the same seven witches and wizards, all wearing bright orange robes, carrying broomsticks and waving energetically.
    ‘Your Quidditch team?’ said Harry.
    ‘The Chudley Cannons,’ said Ron, pointing at the orange bedspread, which was emblazoned with two giant black Cs and a speeding cannonball. ‘Ninth in the league.’
    Ron’s school spellbooks were stacked untidily in a corner, next to a pile of comics which all seemed to feature The Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle. Ron’s magic wand was lying on top of a fish tank full of frogspawn on the window-sill, next to his fat grey rat, Scabbers, who was snoozing in a patch of sun.
    Harry stepped over a pack of Self-Shuffling playing cards on the floor and looked out of the tiny window. In the field far below he could see a gang of gnomes sneaking, one by one, back through the Weasleys’ hedge. Then he turned to look at Ron, who was watching him almost nervously, as though waiting for his opinion.
    ‘It’s a bit small,’ said Ron quickly. ‘Not like that room you had with the Muggles. And I’m right underneath the ghoul in the attic, he’s always banging on the pipes and groaning …’
    But Harry, grinning widely, said, ‘This is the best house I’ve ever been in.’
    Ron’s ears went pink.

— CHAPTER FOUR —

At Flourish and Blotts
    Life at The Burrow was as different as possible from life in Privet Drive. The Dursleys liked everything neat and ordered; the Weasleys’ house burst with the strange and unexpected. Harry got a shock the first time he looked in the mirror over the kitchen mantelpiece and it shouted, ‘Tuck your shirt in, scruffy!’ The ghoul in the attic howled and dropped pipes whenever he felt things were getting too quiet, and small explosions from Fred and George’s bedroom were considered perfectly normal. What Harry found most unusual about life at Ron’s, however, wasn’t the talking mirror or the clanking ghoul: it was the fact that everybody there seemed to like him.
    Mrs Weasley fussed over the state of his socks and tried to force him to eat fourth helpings at every meal. Mr Weasley liked Harry to sit next to him at the dinner table so that he could bombard him with questions about life with Muggles, asking him to explain how things like plugs and the postal service worked.
    ‘Fascinating!’ he would say, as Harry talked him through using a telephone. ‘Ingenious, really, how many ways Muggles have found of getting along without magic.’
    Harry heard from Hogwarts one sunny morning about a week after he had arrived at The Burrow. He and