‘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, relieved from the fascination of her too-visible presence, obeyed the summons, and Rufus, seating himself upon a broken stool, took his hand in moist and quivering fingers, and touching the warts one by one, recommenced his mumble. It had proceeded for a minute or so, when a crash, which, following as it did on the dead stillness, an earthquake could scarce have equalled, elicited a scream from Mrs. Jenny and brought the wizard to his knees with a yell of terror. ‘My blessid!’ he cried, with clacking jaws, ‘I’ve done it at last! Get thee behind me, Satan!’