The Phoenix and the Carpet

The five children of Five Children and It find a strange egg inside a second-hand carpet, and when it falls into the fire it hatches into a vain, talkative Phoenix. The carpet turns out to be magic and will carry them anywhere they wish, three wishes a day: to a tower in France, a tropical island, a bazaar in India and, disastrously, back home with a cargo of 199 Persian cats and a cow. Meanwhile the Phoenix insists on being worshipped at a London fire insurance office that bears its name.

E. Nesbit published the book in 1904, the second of her trilogy after Five Children and It. For more in the same vein, read The Railway Children.