the shock of this failure he dropped the spy-glass, picked it up, and
tried once more to fix the keeper. Instead he only got a circle of
black-lead-coloured elephant; and while he was trying to find the
keeper, and finding nothing but more and more of the elephant, a shout
startled him and he dropped the glass once more. He was a very clumsy
little boy, was Edward.

'Well,' said one of the men, 'what a turn it give me! I thought Jumbo'd
grown as big as a railway station, s'welp me if I didn't.'

'Now that's rum,' said another, 'so did I.'

'And he _ain't_,' said a third; 'seems to me he's a bit below his usual
figure. Got a bit thin or somethink, ain't he?'

Edward slipped back into the tent unobserved.

'It's all right,' he whispered to his friend, 'he's gone back to his
proper size, and the man didn't change at all.'

'Ho!' Gustus said slowly--'Ho! All right. Conjuring's a rum thing. You
don't never know where you are!'

'Don't you think you might as well be a conjurer as a burglar?'
suggested Edward, who had had his friend's criminal future rather
painfully on his mind for the last hour.

'_You_ might,' said Gustus, 'not me. My people ain't dooks to set me up
on any such a swell lay as conjuring. Now I'm going to think, I am. You
hold your jaw and look at the 'andsome Dona a-doin' of 'er griceful
barebacked hact.'

That evening after tea Edward went, as he had been told to do, to the
place on the shore where the big stones had taught him the magic of the
spy-glass.

Gustus was already at the tryst.

'See here,' he said, 'I'm a-goin' to do something brave and fearless, I
am, like Lord Nelson and the boy on the fire-ship. You out with that
spy-glass, an' I'll let you look at _me_. Then we'll know where we are.'

'But s'pose you turn into a giant?'

'Don't care. 'Sides, I shan't. T'other bloke didn't.'

'P'r'aps,' said Edward, cautiously, 'it only works by the seashore.'

'Ah,' said Gustus, reproachfully, 'you've been a-trying to think, that's
what you've been a-doing. What about the elephant, my emernent
scientister? Now, then!'

Very much afraid, Edward pulled out the glass and looked.

And nothing happened.

'That's number one,' said Gustus, 'now, number two.'

He snatched the telescope from Edward's hand, and turned it round and
looked through the other end at the great stones. Edward, standing by,
saw them get smaller and smaller--turn to pebbles, to beach, to sand.
When Gustus turned the gl