-. I
myself haven't a very quick ear and it was a tongue-twisting sound,
but Gip--he has his mother's ear--got it in no time. "Bravo!" said the
shopman, putting the men back into the box unceremoniously and handing
it to Gip. "Now," said the shopman, and in a moment Gip had made them
all alive again.

"You'll take that box?" asked the shopman.

"We'll take that box," said I, "unless you charge its full value. In
which case it would need a Trust Magnate--"

"Dear heart! NO!" and the shopman swept the little men back again, shut
the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown paper,
tied up and--WITH GIP'S FULL NAME AND ADDRESS ON THE PAPER!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

"This is the genuine magic," he said. "The real thing."

"It's a little too genuine for my taste," I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still odder
the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them inside out,
and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit of a head in the
sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might. "Hey, presto!" said the Magic
Shopman, and then would come the clear, small "Hey, presto!" of the boy.
But I was distracted by other things. It was being borne in upon me just
how tremendously rum this place was; it was, so to speak, inundated by
a sense of rumness. There was something a little rum about the fixtures
even, about the ceiling, about the floor, about the casually distributed
chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn't looking at them
straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless
puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the cornice had a serpentine
design with masks--masks altogether too expressive for proper plaster.

Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking
assistants. He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence--I
saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys and
through an arch--and, you know, he was leaning against a pillar in an
idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his features! The
particular horrid thing he did was with his nose. He did it just as
though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself. First of all it was a
short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out like a telescope,
and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner until it was like
a long, red, flexible whip. Like a thing in a nightmare it was! He
flourished it abo