After several ineffectual attempts to light this, he discovered it was a safety match.  He threw it down, and then it occurred to him that he might have willed it lit.  He did, and perceived it burning in the midst of his toilet-table mat.  He caught it up hastily, and it went out.  His perception of possibilities enlarged, and he felt for and replaced the candle in its candlestick.  “Here! you be lit,” said Mr. Fotheringay, and forthwith the candle was flaring, and he saw a little black hole in the toilet-cover, with a wisp of smoke rising from it.  For a time he stared from this to the little flame and back, and then looked up and met his own gaze in the looking-glass.  By this help he communed with himself in silence for a time.

“How about miracles now?” said Mr. Fotheringay at last, addressing his reflection.

The subsequent meditations of Mr. Fotheringay were of a severe but confused description.  So far, he could see it was a case of pure willing with him.  The nature of his experiences so far disinclined him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered them.  But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush.  Somewhere in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact of which he had indeed had inklings before, but no certain assurance.  The scare and perplexity of his first discovery was now qualified by pride in this evidence of singularity and by vague intimations of advantage.  He became aware that the church clock was striking one, and as it did not occur to him that his daily duties at Gomshott’s might be miraculously dispensed with, he resumed undressing, in order to get to bed without further delay.  As he struggled to get his shirt over his head, he was struck with a brilliant idea.  “Let me be in bed,” he said, and found himself so.  “Undressed,” he stipulated; and, finding the sheets cold, added hastily, “and in my nightshirt—­ho, in a nice soft woollen nightshirt.  Ah!” he said with immense enjoyment.  “And now let me be comfortably asleep...”

He awoke at his usual hour and was pensive all through breakfast-time, wondering whether his over-night experience might not be a particularly vivid dream.  At length his mind turned again to cautious experiments.  For instance, he had three eggs for breakfast; two his landlady had supplied, good, but shoppy, and one was a delicious fresh goose-egg, laid, cooked, and served by his extraordinary will.  He hurried off to Gomshott’s in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement, and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke of it that night.  All day he could do no work because of this astonishing new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience, because he made up for it miraculously in his last ten minutes.