e strange old man was coming for his fifteen-and-six and to fit
the magical window into his only room that it occurred to Mr.
Sladden's mind that he did not want a window. And then they were at
the door of the house in which he rented a room, and it seemed too
late to explain.

The stranger demanded privacy when he fitted up the window, so Mr.
Sladden remained outside the door at the top of a little flight of
creaky stairs. He heard no sound of hammering.

And presently the strange old man came out with his faded yellow robe
and his great beard, and his eyes on far-off places. "It is finished,"
he said, and he and the young man parted. And whether he remained a
spot of colour and an anachronism in London, or whether he ever came
again to Baghdad, and what dark hands kept on the circulation of his
twenty-five-and-six, Mr. Sladden never knew.

Mr. Sladden entered the bare-boarded room in which he slept and spent
all his indoor hours between closing-time and the hour at which
Messrs. Mergin and Chater commenced. To the Penates of so dingy a room
his neat frock-coat must have been a continual wonder. Mr. Sladden
took it off and folded it carefully; and there was the old man's
window rather high up in the wall. There had been no window in that
wall hitherto, nor any ornament at all but a small cupboard, so when
Mr. Sladden had put his frock-coat safely away he glanced through his
new window. It was where his cupboard had been in which he kept his
tea-things: they were all standing on the table now. When Mr. Sladden
glanced through his new window it was late in a summer's evening; the
butterflies some while ago would have closed their wings, though the
bat would scarcely yet be drifting abroad--but this was in London: the
shops were shut and street-lamps not yet lighted.

Mr. Sladden rubbed his eyes, then rubbed the window, and still he saw
a sky of blazing blue, and far, far down beneath him, so that no sound
came up from it or smoke of chimneys, a mediaeval city set with
towers; brown roofs and cobbled streets, and then white walls and
buttresses, and beyond them bright green fields and tiny streams. On
the towers archers lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and now
and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lumbered through
the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up
to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the
fields. Sometimes folks put their heads out of la