gan to dictate a Deed of Conveyance from a precedent
deed in his hand. After dictating for some few minutes--

"Murphy," said he, and at the word the young lady studying the cartoons
stiffened, "I've rather lost the thread of that clause; please read
what you have down."

Murphy began to read, and, at the first word, the girl made a tiny,
shrill, mouse's noise, and then stood stock-still, tightened up and
frightened, with her two wild eyes trying to peep around her ears.

Mr. Murphy heard the noise and faltered--he knew instinctively.
Something told him with the bellowing assurance of a cannon who was
there. He must look. He forced his slack face past the granite image
that was his employer, saw a serge-clad figure that he knew, one ear
and the curve of a cheek. Then a cascade broke inside his head. It
buzzed and chattered and crashed, with now and again the blank
brutality of thunder bashing through the noise. The serge-clad figure
swelled suddenly to a tremendous magnitude, and then it receded just as
swiftly, and the vast earth spun minutely on a pin's point ten million
miles away, and she was behind it, her eyes piercing with scorn. . . .
Through the furious winds that whirled about his brain he heard a
whisper, thin and cold, and insistent as a razor's edge, "Go on,
Murphy; go on, Murphy." He strove to fix his attention on his
shorthand notes--To fight it down, to stand the shock like a man, and
then crawl into a hole somewhere and die; but his mind would not grip,
nor his eyes focus. The only words which his empty brain could pump up
were these, irrelevant and idiotic, "'A frog he would a-wooing go,
heigho,' said Rowley"; and they must not be said. "It is a bit
difficult, perhaps," said the whispering voice that crept through the
tumult of winds and waters in his head. "Never mind, take down the
rest of it," and the far-away whisper began to say things all about
nothing, making queer little noises and pauses, running for a moment
into a ripple of sound, and eddying and dying away and coming back
again--buz-z-z! His notebook lying on the table was as small as a
postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand was as big as an elephant's
leg. How can a man write on a microscopic blur with the stump of a fir
tree? He poked and prodded, and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few moments
his clerk poking his note-book with the wrong end of a pencil. He
silently pulled his daughter forward and made her look. After a
little--

"