Well, Henry, you can cease frowning at me. If I am a magician, I am a very indifferent one. Other adepts summon up fairy-spirits and long-dead kings. I appear to have conjured the spirit of a banker.

What nobility of feeling! To sacrifice your own pleasure to preserve the comfort of others! It is a thing, I confess, that would never occur to me.

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.

Ha!' said the tall man drily. 'He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.

Drawing teaches habits of close observation that will always be useful.

He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.