there was born a man-child with a magic shadow.

His case was so rare that a number of doctors have been disputing
over it ever since and picking his parents' histories and genealogies
to bits, to find the cause. Their inquiries do not help us much.
The father drove a cab; the mother was a charwoman and came of a
consumptive family. But these facts will not quite account for a
magic shadow. The birth took place on the night of a new moon, down
a narrow alley into which neither moon nor sun ever penetrated beyond
the third-storey windows--and that is why the parents were so long in
discovering their child's miraculous gift. The hospital-student who
attended merely remarked that the babe was small and sickly, and
advised the mother to drink sound port-wine while nursing him,--which
she could not afford.

Nevertheless, the boy struggled somehow through five years of life,
and was put into smallclothes. Two weeks after this promotion his
mother started off to scrub out a big house in the fashionable
quarter, and took him with her: for the house possessed a wide
garden, laid with turf and lined with espaliers, sunflowers, and
hollyhocks, and as the month was August, and the family away in
Scotland, there seemed no harm in letting the child run about in this
paradise while she worked. A flight of steps descended from the
drawing-room to the garden, and as she knelt on her mat in the cool
room it was easy to keep an eye on him. Now and then she gazed out
into the sunshine and called; and the boy stopped running about and
nodded back, or shouted the report of some fresh discovery.

By-and-by a sulphur butterfly excited him so that he must run up the
broad stone steps with the news. The woman laughed, looking at his
flushed face, then down at his shoe-strings, which were untied: and
then she jumped up, crying out sharply--"Stand still, child--stand
still a moment!"

She might well stare. Her boy stood and smiled in the sun, and his
shadow lay on the whitened steps. Only the silhouette was not that
of a little breeched boy at all, but of a little girl in petticoats;
and it wore long curls, whereas the charwoman's son was
close-cropped.

The woman stepped out on the terrace to look closer. She twirled her
son round and walked him down into the garden, and backwards and
forwards, and stood him in all manner of positions and attitudes, and
rubbed her eyes. But there was no mistake: the shadow was that of a
little