Sarah and Mark were a pair of champion gossips. They were always spying, and poking their noses into anything and everything. And how they loved to broadcast what they had discovered - which was a lot, and very little of it good. People had often explained to them the importance of respecting others' privacy, but they would just reply, "If they had nothing to hide then they wouldn't mind. We have nothing to hide, so we couldn't care less."

Then, one day, a poor, bad-tempered wizard with very few powers, crossed their path. Sarah and Mark managed to break one of the wizard's tricks, so the wizard decided to get his revenge by using a strange spell which would give all the children a good laugh, before he moved on. The next day, when Sarah and Mark were sitting in class, the emergency speaker came on. It was the wizard's voice. He said,

"Ding dong dinnnng! Ding dong dinnnng! Attention! Sarah Jones thinks Robert is very good-looking, and she'd like to be his girlfriend. Ding dong dinnnng!”

How embarrassed Sarah felt! She hadn't told anyone how she felt about Robert, and she turned as red as a ripe tomato. There was quite a commotion in class, and the noise only subsided when the speaker came on again:

"Attention! Right now, Mark Smith is thinking that Anthony Wilson is a fat and rather foolish gorilla, and that if he - Smith - were a bit bigger, he'd give Wilson a seriously good beating. Ding dong dinnnng!"

Mark dearly wanted to run out of the classroom to hide.

And so it went. Throughout the day the speaker would come on and reveal the innermost thoughts of our two little gossips. With every passing minute their trouble and embarrassment were mounting. So much so, that eventually the two of them went over to the speaker, crying with anger, and demanding that the voice stop reporting their thoughts.

"If you have nothing to hide then it shouldn't bother you," answered the wizard.

"Of course we have nothing to hide!" they answered, "but those are private thoughts!" And their complaints continued.

After a while the complaints petered out, and Sarah and Mark looked at each other. They had finally realised that what the wizard was now doing was exactly what they themselves had been doing all their lives. After they promised not to gossip any more about other people's private lives, the wizard removed the spell and said goodbye to them all.

And every child in that class long remembered that hilarious morning at school, where they were given a most effective lesson on the importance of respecting others' privacy.