hour and was pensive all through breakfast-time,
wondering whether his over-night experience might not be a particularly
vivid dream. At length his mind turned again to cautious experiments. For
instance, he had three eggs for breakfast; two his landlady had supplied,
good, but shoppy, and one was a delicious fresh goose-egg, laid, cooked,
and served by his extraordinary will. He hurried off to Gomshott's in a
state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered
the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night. All
day he could do no work because of this astonishing new self-knowledge,
but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it
miraculously in his last ten minutes.

As the day wore on his state of mind passed from wonder to elation, albeit
the circumstances of his dismissal from the Long Dragon were still
disagreeable to recall, and a garbled account of the matter that had
reached his colleagues led to some badinage. It was evident he must be
careful how he lifted frangible articles, but in other ways his gift
promised more and more as he turned it over in his mind. He intended among
other things to increase his personal property by unostentatious acts of
creation. He called into existence a pair of very splendid diamond studs,
and hastily annihilated them again as young Gomshott came across the
counting-house to his desk. He was afraid young Gomshott might wonder how
he had come by them. He saw quite clearly the gift required caution and
watchfulness in its exercise, but so far as he could judge the
difficulties attending its mastery would be no greater than those he had
already faced in the study of cycling. It was that analogy, perhaps, quite
as much as the feeling that he would be unwelcome in the Long Dragon, that
drove him out after supper into the lane beyond the gasworks, to rehearse
a few miracles in private.

There was possibly a certain want of originality in his attempts, for,
apart from his will-power, Mr. Fotheringay was not a very exceptional man.
The miracle of Moses' rod came to his mind, but the night was dark and
unfavourable to the proper control of large miraculous snakes. Then he
recollected the story of "Tannhaeuser" that he had read on the back of the
Philharmonic programme. That seemed to him singularly attractive and
harmless. He stuck his walking-stick--a very nice Poona-Penang lawyer--
into the turf that edged the footpath, and comm