He was beginning to remodel the kingdom to his own fancy. Instead of a Lord Chief Good-doer he had a Lord Chief Magician, and instead of the Education Department he had a Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic, and he shut up the free washhouses. “Who wants to wash?” said he, and he ordered a free distribution of nasty medicine instead; and altogether he was really beginning to enjoy himself when another tell-tale-tit came fluttering in at the window of his laboratory, and, perching on the top of a crucible, told him of a Rumour. The Rumour had been running about the town like a mad thing, and wherever it ran it left its tail behind it. Rumour, as you know, is a beast with many tales; and now everybody knew that the white stone had moved in the night and had come rolling up to the gate of the town. “Whatever shall we do?” said the Lord Chief Magician, who was pounding up nasty things in the mortar ready for the free distribution of medicine next day. “Smash it,” said Negretti. “I’ll take a turn at the medicine while you go and see the thing done.” So the Lord Chief Magician called together the Permanent Committee of Black and Coloured Magic and sent them to break the stone. And when they began to hit it with their hammers and picks seventeen sharp splinters of white stone flew off, and each splinter hit a member of the Committee in the eye and killed him. There were exactly seventeen members, as it happened. So then the Lord Chief Magician shut the town gates and ran home and hid under the bed. And the people of the town were very much interested in the stone that had rolled by itself and had killed seventeen members of the Committee, and they made little parties and picnics all day long, taking their children to look at the stone and carrying sandwiches with them and bottles of beer. The Magician was very angry. “Such rubbish I never heard of,” said he when the tell-tale-tit alighted on the window-sill and told him of it. “If they want to look at anything, why can’t they come and look at _me_? I’m sure I’m coloured enough!” That night the stone rose up in the thickest of the black dark, when no one at all is out of doors, except the Police—and not always him—and it smashed through the town gate and came rolling right up into the Square and lay there. The tell-tale-tit awoke the Magician in the morning by singing the news sharply in his ear, and he went out to see. There was a great crowd in the Square, and they all cried out— “It is a magic stone. It will bring us luck. Build it into the royal Palace.” “I might do worse,” thought Negretti. “If good Roman cement and a double coat of magenta paint doesn’t keep it quiet nothing will.”