the luck to be performed when nobody but
Merlin was present; he couldn't start this well with all this crowd
around to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's miracle in
that day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was
sure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial
moment and spoil everything. But I did not want Merlin to retire
from the job until I was ready to take hold of it effectively
myself; and I could not do that until I got my things from Camelot,
and that would take two or three days.

My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered them up a good deal;
insomuch that they ate a square meal that night for the first time
in ten days. As soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforced
with food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began to
go round they rose faster. By the time everybody was half-seas over,
the holy community was in good shape to make a night of it; so we
stayed by the board and put it through on that line. Matters got
to be very jolly. Good old questionable stories were told that made
the tears run down and cavernous mouths stand wide and the round
bellies shake with laughter; and questionable songs were bellowed out
in a mighty chorus that drowned the boom of the tolling bells.

At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the success of it.
Not right off, of course, for the native of those islands does
not, as a rule, dissolve upon the early applications of a humorous
thing; but the fifth time I told it, they began to crack in places;
the eight time I told it, they began to crumble; at the twelfth
repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth they
disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up. This language
is figurative. Those islanders--well, they are slow pay at first,
in the matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the end
they make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.

I was at the well next day betimes. Merlin was there, enchanting
away like a beaver, but not raising the moisture. He was not in
a pleasant humor; and every time I hinted that perhaps this contract
was a shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue and
cursed like a bishop--French bishop of the Regency days, I mean.

Matters were about as I expected to find them. The "fountain" was
an ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned up
in the ordinary way. There was no miracle abou