* * * *

She wrote a word upon the air with her finger, and made a flourish under
the word. So flowery was the flourish that it span her round, right
round upon her toes, and she faced her watchers again. The committee
jumped, for the blind ran up, and outside the window, at the end of a
strange perspective of street, the trees of some far square were as soft
as thistledown against a lemon-coloured sky. A sound came up the
street....

The forgotten April and the voices of lambs pealed like bells into the
room....

Oh, let us flee from April! We are but swimmers in seas of words, we
members of committees, and to the song of April there are no words. What
do we know, and what does London know, after all these years of
learning?

Old Mother London crouches, with her face buried in her hands; and she
is walled in with her fogs and her loud noises, and over her head are
the heavy beams of her dark roof, and she has the barred sun for a
skylight, and winds that are but hideous draughts rush under her door.
London knows much, and every moment she learns a new thing, but this she
shall never learn--that the sun shines all day and the moon all night on
the silver tiles of her dark house, and that the young months climb her
walls, and run singing in and out between her chimneys....

* * * * *

Nothing else happened in that room. At least nothing more important than
the ordinary manifestations attendant upon magic. The lamp had
tremulously gone out. Coloured flames danced about the Stranger's head.
One felt the thrill of a purring cat against one's ankles, one saw its
green eyes glare. But these things hardly counted.

It was all over. The Mayor was heard cracking his fingers, and
whispering "Puss, Puss." The lamp relighted itself. Nobody had known
that it was so gifted.

The Mayor said: "Splendid, miss, quite splendid. You'd make a fortune on
the stage." His tongue, however, seemed to be talking by itself, without
the assistance of the Mayor himself. One could see that he was shaken
out of his usual grocerly calm, for his feverish hand was stroking a cat
where no cat was.

Black cats are only the showy properties of magic, easily materialised,
even by beginners, at will. It must be confusing for such an orderly
animal as the cat to exist in this intermittent way, never knowing, so
to speak, whether it is there or not there, from one moment to another.

The sixth