"Will you eat it?" asked Wilbraham, politely extending the platter in her direction. "Never!" she cried, shuddering. "I should not dare. It is too uncanny." "Then I will," said Wilbraham. "If the old man spoke the truth--" He swallowed the egg at a single gulp. "Fine!" he murmured, in an ecstasy of gastronomic pleasure. "I wish there were two more just like it!" No sooner had he spoken these words than two more poached eggs, even as he had wished, appeared upon the platter. "Great heavens, Ethelinda!" he cried. "The wishes come true! I wish to goodness I knew who that old duffer was." The words had scarcely fallen from his lips when a card fluttered down from the ceiling. Wilbraham sprang forward excitedly and caught it as it fell. It read: HENRY W. OBERON Secretary, The United States Fairy Co., 3007 Wall Street "Henry W. Oberon, United States Fairy Company, Wall Street, eh?" he muttered. "By Jove, I wish I knew--" "Stop!" cried his wife, seizing him by the arm, imploringly. "Do stop, Richard. You have used up two of your wishes already. Think what you need most before you waste the third." "Wise Ethelinda," he murmured, patting her gently on the hand. "Very, very wise, and I will be careful. Let me see now.... I wish I had ... I wish I had...." He paused for a long time, and then his face fairly beamed with a great light of joy. "I wish I had three more wishes!" he cried. Another crash of thunder shook the house to its very foundations, and a lightning flash turned the darkness of the interior of the dwelling into a vivid golden yellow that dazzled them, and then all went dusk again. "Mercy!" shuddered the good wife. "I hope that was an answer to your wish." "It won't take long to find out," said Wilbraham. "I'll tackle a few more natural desires right here and now, and if they come true I'll know that that thunderbolt was a rush message from the United States Fairy Company telling me to draw on them at sight." "Well, don't be extravagant," his wife cautioned him. "I'll be as extravagant as I please," he retorted. "If my fourth wish works, Ethelinda, my address from this hour on will be Easy Street and Treasury Avenue. I wish first then that this old farm was in Ballyhack!" [Illustration: "BALLYHACK! LAST STATION--ALL OUT!"] "Ballyhack! Last station--all out!" cried a hoarse voice at the door. Wilbraham rushed to the window and peered out into what had been the night, but had now become a picture of something worse. Great clouds of impenetrable smoke hung over the grim stretches of a dismal-looking country in which there seemed to be nothing but charred remnants of ruined trees and blackened rocks, over which, in an endless line, a weary mass of struggling plodders, men and women, toiled onward through the grime of a hopeless environment. "Great Scott!" he cried, in dismay, as the squalid misery of the prospect smote upon his vision. "This is worse than Diggville. I wish to heaven we were back again."