Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians. They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.

It was an old fashioned house --the sort of house in fact, as Strange expressed it, which a lady in a novel might like to be persecuted in.

Well, I suppose one ought not to employ a magician and then complain that he does not behave like other people.

..The argument he was conducting with his neighbor as to whether the English magician had gone mad because he was a magician, or because he was English.

Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.

The land is all too shallow It is painted on the sky And trembles like the wind-shook rain When the Raven King passed by

After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue.