d was pensive all through breakfast-time,
wondering whether his overnight experience might not be a particularly
vivid dream. At length his mind turned again to cautious experiments.
For instance, he had three eggs for breakfast; two his landlady had
supplied, good, but shoppy, and one was a delicious fresh goose-egg,
laid, cooked, and served by his extraordinary will. He hurried off to
Gomshott's in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement,
and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady spoke
of it that night. All day he could do no work because of this
astonishingly new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience,
because he made up for it miraculously in his last ten minutes.

As the day wore on his state of mind passed from wonder to elation,
albeit the circumstances of his dismissal from the Long Dragon were
still disagreeable to recall, and a garbled account of the matter that
had reached his colleagues led to some badinage. It was evident he must
be careful how he lifted frangible articles, but in other ways his gift
promised more and more as he turned it over in his mind. He intended
among other things to increase his personal property by unostentatious
acts of creation. He called into existence a pair of very splendid
diamond studs, and hastily annihilated them again as young Gomshott came
across the counting-house to his desk. He was afraid young Gomshott
might wonder how he had come by them. He saw quite clearly the gift
required caution and watchfulness in its exercise, but so far as he
could judge the difficulties attending its mastery would be no greater
than those he had already faced in the study of cycling. It was that
analogy, perhaps, quite as much as the feeling that he would be
unwelcome in the Long Dragon, that drove him out after supper into the
lane beyond the gas-works, to rehearse a few miracles in private.

There was possibly a certain want of originality in his attempts, for
apart from his will-power Mr. Fotheringay was not a very exceptional
man. The miracle of Moses' rod came to his mind, but the night was dark
and unfavourable to the proper control of large miraculous snakes. Then
he recollected the story of "Tannhaeuser" that he had read on the back of
the Philharmonic programme. That seemed to him singularly attractive and
harmless. He stuck his walking-stick--a very nice Poona-Penang
lawyer--into the turf that edged the footpath, and commanded th