"I wasn't going to try too hard in front of Scrimgeour was I?"
"What do you mean?" asked Hermione.
"The Snitch I caught in my first ever Quidditch match?" said Harry. "Don't you
remember?"
Hermione looked simply bemused. Ron, however, gasped, pointing frantically
from Harry to the Snitch and back again until he found his voice.
"That was the one you nearly swallowed!"
"Exactly," said Harry, and with his heart beating fast, he pressed his mouth to the
Snitch.
It did not open. Frustration and bitter disappointment welled up inside him: He
lowered the golden sphere, but then Hermione cried out.
"Writing! There's writing on it, quick, look!"
He nearly dropped the Snitch in surprise and excitement. Hermione was quite right.
Engraved upon the smooth golden surface, where seconds before there had been nothing,
were five words written in the thin, slanted handwriting that Harry recognized as
Dumbledore's
I open at the close.
He had barely read them when the words vanished again.
"I open at the close…." What's that supposed to mean?"
Hermione and Ron shook their heads, looking blank.
"I open at the close… at the close… I open at the close…"
But no matter how often they repeated the words, with many different inflections,
they were unable to wring any more meaning from them.
"And the sword," said Ron finally, when they had at last abandoned their attempts
to divine meaning in the Snitch's inscription.
"Why did he want Harry to have the sword?"
"And why couldn't he just have told me?" Harry said quietly. "I was there, it was
right there on the wall of his office during all our talks last year! If he wanted me to have
it, why didn't he just give it to me then?"
He felt as thought he were sitting in an examination with a question he ought to
have been able to answer in front of him, his brain slow and unresponsive. Was there
something he had missed in the long talks with Dumbledore last year? Ought he to know
what it all meant? Had Dumbledore expected him to understand?
"And as for this book." Said Hermione, "The Tales of Beedle the Bard … I've
never even heard of them!"
"You've never heard of The Tales of Beedle the Bard?" said Ron incredulously.
"You're kidding, right?"
"No, I'm not," said Hermione in surprise. "Do you know them then?"
"Well, of course I do!"
Harry looked up, diverted. The circumstance of Ron having read a book that
Hermione had not was unprecedented. Ron, however, looked bemused by their surprise.
"Oh come on! All the old kids' stories are supposed to be Beedle's aren't they?
'The Fountain of Fair Fortune' … 'The Wizard and the Hopping Pot'… 'Babbitty Rabbitty
and her Cackling Stump'…"
"Excuse me?" said Hermione giggling. "What was the last one?"
"Come off it!" said Ron, looking in disbelief from Harry to Hermione. "You
must've heard of Babbitty Rabbitty –"
"Ron, you know full well Harry and I were brought up by Muggles!" said
Hermione. "We didn't hear stories like that when we were little, we heard 'Snow White