It was the size of the elephant that did it. Edward had not seen an elephant before, and when he saw it, instead of saying, 'What a size he is!' as everybody else did, he said to himself, 'What a size I could make him!' and pulled out the spy-glass, and by a miracle of good luck or bad got it levelled at the elephant as it went by. He turned the glass slowly--as it went out--and the elephant only just got out in time. Another moment and it would have been too big to get through the door. The audience cheered madly. They thought it was a clever trick; and so it would have been, very clever. 'You silly cuckoo,' said Gustus, bitterly, 'now you've turned that great thing loose on the country, and how's his keeper to manage him?' 'I could make the keeper big, too.' 'Then if I was you I should just bunk out and do it.' Edward obeyed, slipped under the canvas of the circus tent, and found himself on the yellow, trampled grass of the field among guy-ropes, orange-peel, banana-skins, and dirty paper. Far above him and every one else towered the elephant--it was now as big as the church. Edward pointed the glass at the man who was patting the elephant's foot--that was as far up as he could reach--and telling it to 'Come down with you!' He was very much frightened. He did not know whether you could be put in prison for making an elephant's keeper about forty times his proper size. But he felt that something must be done to control the gigantic mountain of black-lead-coloured living flesh. So he looked at the keeper through the spy-glass, and the keeper remained his normal size! In the shock of this failure he dropped the spy-glass, picked it up, and tried once more to fix the keeper. Instead he only got a circle of black-lead-coloured elephant; and while he was trying to find the keeper, and finding nothing but more and more of the elephant, a shout startled him and he dropped the glass once more. He was a very clumsy little boy, was Edward. 'Well,' said one of the men, 'what a turn it give me! I thought Jumbo'd grown as big as a railway station, s'welp me if I didn't.' 'Now that's rum,' said another, 'so did I.' 'And he _ain't_,' said a third; 'seems to me he's a bit below his usual figure. Got a bit thin or somethink, ain't he?' Edward slipped back into the tent unobserved. 'It's all right,' he whispered to his friend, 'he's gone back to his proper size, and the man didn't change at all.' 'Ho!' Gustus said slowly--'Ho! All right. Conjuring's a rum thing. You don't never know where you are!' 'Don't you think you might as well be a conjurer as a burglar?' suggested Edward, who had had his friend's criminal future rather painfully on his mind for the last hour. '_You_ might,' said Gustus, 'not me. My people ain't dooks to set me up on any such a swell lay as conjuring. Now I'm going to think, I am. You hold your jaw and look at the 'andsome Dona a-doin' of 'er griceful barebacked hact.'