digital fellow. After all, Gip was enjoying it. And no doubt when
the time came to go we should be able to go quite easily.

It was a long, rambling place, that showroom, a gallery broken up by
stands and stalls and pillars, with archways leading off to other
departments, in which the queerest-looking assistants loafed and stared at
one, and with perplexing mirrors and curtains. So perplexing, indeed, were
these that I was presently unable to make out the door by which we had
come.

The shopman showed Gip magic trains that ran without steam or clockwork,
just as you set the signals, and then some very, very valuable boxes of
soldiers that all came alive directly you took off the lid and said----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 plaste