ts the
eye; beyond that I'll offer no opinion. Outside the magic I believe the
whole business was a put-up job, to catch my attention and take me
unawares. For when I stepped back, pretty well startled, and blinking
from the strain of keeping my attention fixed on the boy's palm, a man
jumped forward from the crowd and precious nearly knifed me. If it hadn't
been for Moung Gway, who tripped him up and knocked him sideways, I should
have been a dead man in two twos--for my friends were taken aback by the
suddenness of it. But in less than a minute we had him down and the
handcuffs on him; and the end was, he got five years' hard, which means
hefting chain-shot from one end to another of the prison square and then
hefting it back again. There was a rather neat little Burmese girl, you
see--a sort of niece of Moung Gway's--who had taken a fancy to me; and
this turned out to be a disappointed lover, just turned up from a voyage
to Cagayan in a paddy-boat. I believed he had fixed it up with the
venerable one to hold me with the magic until he got in his stroke.
Venomous beggars, those Burmans, if you cross 'em in the wrong way!
The fellow got his release a week before I left Maulmain for good, and the
very next day Moung Gway was found, down by the quays, dead as a haddock,
with a wound between the shoulder-blades as neat as if he'd been measured
for it. Oh, I could tell you a story or two about those fellows!"

"It's easily explained, at any rate," Mr. Molesworth suggested, "why you
see a dark-skinned man in your dream."

"But I tell you, my dear sir, he has been a part of the dream from the
beginning . . . before I went to Wren's, and long before ever I thought of
Burmah. He's as old as the church itself, and the foreshore and the
cottage--the whole scene, in fact--though I can't say he's half as
distinct. I can't tell you in the least, for instance, what his features
are like. I've said that the upper part of the dream is vague to me;
at the end of the foreshore, that is, where the cottage stands; the church
tower I can see plainly enough to the very top. But over by the cottage--
above the porch, as you may say--everything seems to swim in a mist:
and it's up in that mist the fellow's head and shoulders appear and
vanish. Sometimes I think he's looking out of the window at me, and draws
back into the room as if he didn't want to be seen; and the mist itself
gathers and floats away with the hissing sound I tol