isions, he sprang up
with a start, and, lighting a candle, descended to the dining-room.
There he stood on a chair, reached for the blue jar on the bookcase,
extracted the two eggs, and carried them upstairs. He opened his window
and threw the eggs into the middle of Dawes Road, but several houses
lower down; they fell with a soft _plup_, and scattered.

Thus ended the miraculous evening.

The next day he was prostrate with one of his very worst dyspeptic
visitations. The Knight pew at Munster Park Chapel was empty at both
services, and Henry learnt from loving lips that he must expect to be
ill if he persisted in working so hard. He meekly acknowledged the
justice of the rebuke.

On Monday morning at half-past eight, before he had appeared at
breakfast, there came a telegram, which Aunt Annie opened. It had been
despatched from Paris on the previous evening, and it ran:
'_Congratulations on the box trick. Worth half a dozen books with the
dear simple public A sincere admirer._' This telegram puzzled everybody,
including Henry; though perhaps it puzzled Henry a little less than the
ladies. When Aunt Annie suggested that it had been wrongly addressed, he
agreed that no other explanation was possible, and Sarah took it back to
the post-office.

He departed to business. At all the newspaper-shops, at all the
bookstalls, he saw the placards of morning newspapers with lines
conceived thus:

AMUSING INCIDENT AT THE ALHAMBRA.
A NOVELIST'S ADVENTURE.
VANISHING AUTHOR AT A MUSIC-HALL.
A NOVELIST IN A BOX.

CHAPTER XVIII

HIS JACK-HORNERISM

That autumn the Chancelleries of Europe happened to be rather less
egotistic than usual, and the English and American publics, seeing no
war-cloud on the horizon, were enabled to give the whole of their
attention to the balloon sent up into the sky by Mr. Onions Winter. They
stared to some purpose. There are some books which succeed before they
are published, and the commercial travellers of Mr. Onions Winter
reported unhesitatingly that _A Question of Cubits_ was such a book. The
libraries and the booksellers were alike graciously interested in the
rumour of its advent. It was universally considered a 'safe' novel; it
was the sort of novel that the honest provincial bookseller reads
himself for his own pleasure and recommends to his customers with a
peculiar and special smile of sincerity as being not only 'good,' but
'_really_ good.' People menti