rk, guests must spend
at least eighteen hours out of the twenty-four entirely alone. No
guest may entertain or be entertained except under special license
obtainable from the Superintendent.

There is a pump in the back yard. There is no telephone, no
electric light, no hot water system, no attendance, and no modern
comfort whatever. Tradesmen are forbidden to call. There is no
charge for residence in this house.

"It certainly sounds an unusual place," admitted Sarah Brown. "Is the
house always full?"

"Never," said the witch. "A lot of people can swallow everything but the
last clause. We have at present one guest, called Peony."

She replaced the prospectus in the drawer, which she then tried to shut.
While she was engaged in this thundering endeavour, Sarah Brown noticed
that the drawer was full of the little paper packets which she had seen
the day before in the witch's possession.

"What do you do with your magic?" she asked.

"Oh, many things. Chiefly I use it as an ingredient for happiness,
sometimes to remind people, and sometimes to make them forget. It seems
to me that some people take happiness rather tragically."

"I find," said Sarah Brown, rather sententiously, "that I always owe my
happiness to earth, never to heaven."

"How d'you mean heaven?" said the witch. "I know nothing about heaven.
When I used to work in the City, I bought a little book about heaven to
read in the Tube every morning. I thought I should grow daily better.
But I couldn't see that I did."

Sarah Brown was naturally astonished to meet any one who did not know
all about heaven. But she continued the pursuit of her ideas on
happiness. Sarah Brown meant to write a book some day, if she could find
a really inspiring exercise-book to start in. She thought herself
rather good at ideas--poor Sarah Brown, she simply had to be confident
about something. She was only inwardly articulate, I think, not
outwardly at all, but sometimes she could talk about herself.

"Heaven has given me wretched health, but never gave me youth enough to
make the wretchedness adventurous," she went on. "Heaven gave me a thin
skin, but never gave me the natural and comforting affections. Heaven
probably meant to make a noble woman of me by encrusting me in
disabilities, but it left out the necessary nobility at the last moment;
it left out, in fact, all the compensations. But luckily I have found
the compensations for m