holding me close, said, “Eh, dear, don’t be frightened; it’s all right!” Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all tearful tendencies, Abracadabra, with a magnificent gesture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily presented me with a clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized with loud buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its wheels again, it proceeded to draw three tin carriages after it. And it was mine, the very thing I had wanted, and Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that her face was rather like Mamma’s. But the likeness must have been purely accidental, because Mamma was in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when Abracadabra went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions of the clockwork train, I was allowed to go up to her room again, and found her still sleepy, it might be indeed considered proved that she was not Abracadabra. Besides, when I told her about Abracadabra’s visit, she was very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked whether Abracadabra had not left any present for her, which she had not. That is the first clear and definite memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I knew, alas, that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, dressed in the amazing garb of fairyland. But though that particular brand of fairyland was finished for me, those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I, concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend that this was genuine Abracadabra, thus indulging and buttressing the belief of my youngest brother Hugh, who still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the subject.... I found those selfsame garments only lately in a trunk stowed away in an attic at the last home my mother lived in; a skirt covered with sprays of artificial flowers, a bodice and stomacher set with gems of pure glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a pair of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes covered with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and mouldy, and it was scarcely possible for the most sentimental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I had the memory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, and that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty-five years later, of the robes themselves. My mother had kept them, I make no doubt, when her own days of Abracadabra were over by reason of our emergence from childhood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in-law would assume them again for the joy and mystification of grandchildren, but that day never came. So the robes of fairyland stowed away in their trunk were forgotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as I turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished years before the house passed into other hands. It was a dark autumn day, and the