“You’ll take that box?” asked the shopman.

“We’ll take that box,” said I, “unless you charge its full value.  In which case it would need a Trust Magnate——­”

“Dear heart! No!” and the shopman swept the little men back again, shut the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown paper, tied up and—­with Gip’s full name and address on the paper!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

“This is the genuine magic,” he said.  “The real thing.”

“It’s a little too genuine for my taste,” I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still odder the way they were done.  He explained them, he turned them inside out, and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit of a head in the sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might.  “Hey, presto!” said the Magic Shopman, and then would come the clear, small “Hey, presto!” of the boy.  But I was distracted by other things.  It was being borne in upon me just how tremendously rum this place was; it was, so to speak, inundated by a sense of rumness.  There was something a little rum about the fixtures even, about the ceiling, about the floor, about the casually distributed chairs.  I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn’t looking at them straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back.  And the cornice had a serpentine design with masks—­masks altogether too expressive for proper plaster.

Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking assistants.  He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence—­I saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys and through an arch—­and, you know, he was leaning against a pillar in an idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his features!  The particular horrid thing he did was with his nose.  He did it just as though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself.  First of all it was a short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out like a telescope, and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner until it was like a long, red flexible whip.  Like a thing in a nightmare it was!  He flourished it about and flung it forth as a fly-fisher flings his line.

My instant thought was that Gip mustn’t see him.  I turned about, and there was Gip quite preoccupied with the shopman, and thinking no evil.  They were whispering together and looking at me.  Gip was standing on a little stool, and the shopman was holding a sort of big drum in his hand.

“Hide and seek, dadda!” cried Gip.  “You’re He!”

And before I could do anything to prevent it, the shopman had clapped the big drum over him.

I saw what was up directly.  “Take that off,” I cried, “this instant!  You’ll frighten the boy.  Take it off!”

The shopman with the unequal ears did so without a word, and held the big cylinder towards me to show its emptiness.  And the little stool was vacant!  In that instant my boy had utterly disappeared!...