on Mitten Island. The inhabitants of model villages always
have assured incomes and pose as lilies of the field. Sarah Brown and
her hostess sat down on the counter without regret to a luncheon
consisting of one orange, found by the guest in her bag and divided, and
two thin captain biscuits from stock. They were both used to dissolving
visions of impossible chops, both were cheerfully familiar with the
feeling of light tragedy which invades you towards six o'clock P.M., if
you have not been able to afford a meal since breakfast.

"Now look here," said Sarah Brown, as she plunged her pocket-knife into
the orange. "Would you mind telling me--are you a fairy, or a
third-floor-back, or anything of that sort? I won't register it, or put
it on the case-paper, I promise, though if you are superhuman in any way
I shall be seriously tempted."

"I am a Witch," said the witch.

Now witches and wizards, as you perhaps know, are people who are born
for the first time. I suppose we have all passed through this fair
experience, we must all have had our chance of making magic. But to most
of us it came in the boring beginning of time, and we wasted our best
spells on plesiosauri, and protoplasms, and angels with flaming swords,
all of whom knew magic too, and were not impressed. Witches and wizards
are now rare, though not so rare as you think. Remembering nothing, they
know nothing, and are not bored. They have to learn everything from the
very beginning, except magic, which is the only really original sin. To
the magic eye, magic alone is commonplace, everything else is unknown,
unguessed, and undespised. Magic people are always obvious--so obvious
that we veteran souls can rarely understand them,--they are never
subtle, and though they are new, they are never Modern. You may tell
them in your cynical way that to-day is the only real day, and that
there is nothing more unmentionable than yesterday except the day
before. They will admire your cleverness very much, but the next moment
you will find the witch sobbing over Tennyson, or the wizard smiling at
the quaint fancies of Sir Edwin Landseer. You cannot really stir up
magic people with ordinary human people. You and I have climbed over our
thousand lives to a too dreadfully subtle eminence. In our day--in our
many days--we have adored everything conceivable, and now we have to
fall back on the inconceivable. We stand our idols on their heads, it is
newer to do so, and we think