niac powers being helpless to prevent
the depredations of his own domestic animal did not appeal. As for Mrs.
Jenny, she had piously believed in witchcraft all her life, and was
quite as insensible to the absurdity as he.

'I want you to look at this young gentleman's hands,' said Mrs. Busker.
'He's got warts that bad. I suppose you can charm 'em away for him?'

Appealed to on a point of his art, the wizard's air changed altogether.
He assumed an aspect of wooden majesty.

'Why, yis,' he said. 'I think I'm equal to that Step inside, mum, and
bring the young gentleman with you.'

'Couldn't you-------' Mrs. Busker hesitatingly began, 'couldn't you do
it outside?'

'The forms and ceremonies,' said the necromancer, with an increase of
woodenness in his manner, 'cannot be applied out o' doors. Arter you,
mum.'

He ushered them into the one room of his hut, and the cat, with her
tail floating above her like a banner, entered too, evading a kick, and
sprang upon a rotten deal shelf, which apparently acted as both dresser
and table.

Rufus closed the ruinous door, thereby intensifying the gloom which
reigned within the place. The floor was of simple earth, unboarded,
and the air smelt of it Here and there a fine spear of ghostly sunlight
pierced a crack in roof or wall. By the time their eyes had become
accustomed to the gloom they saw that Rufus, on his knees on the floor,
was scratching a circle about himself with a scrap of a broken pot, and
the indistinct rhythmic murmur of the spell he muttered reached their
ears.

The cat, perched upon the dresser, purred as if her internal machinery
were running down to final collapse, and her contracting and dilating
eyes borrowed infernal fires from the chance ray of sunshine in which
she sat. The brute's rusty red head, so lit, fascinated Dick, and the
mingled rhythms of her purring and the wizard's mounted and mounted,
until to his bewildered mind the whole world seemed filled with their
murmur, and the demoniac head seemed to dilate as he gazed at it.
Suddenly, Rufus paused in his sing-song, and the cat's purr ceased with
it, as though her share of the charm was done.

'Come into the ring,' said Rufus. His voice was shaky, and if there had
been light enough to see it, his face was gray with terror of his own
hocus-pocus. The cat's head had dropped out of the line of sunlight, and
she had coiled herself up on the dresser among a disorderly litter of
crockery ware. Dick, r