At least, we thought it would be.  But what does a lot of the crowd do, after looking round a little, but drift out into the hall and down to this room where Cousin Egbert had his foul enterprise, whatever it was.  I didn’t know yet, having held aloof, as you might say, owing to the old hound’s offensive manner.  But I had heard three or four parties kind of gasping to each other, had they seen what that Egbert Floud was doing in the other room?—­with looks of horror and delight on their faces.  That made me feel more superior than ever to the old smarty; so I didn’t go near the place yet, but herded people back to the raffles wherever I could.

The first thing was Lon Price’s corner lot, for which a hundred chances had been sold.  Lon had a blueprint showing the very lot; also a picture of a choice dwelling or bungalow, like the one he has painted on the drop curtain of Knapp’s Opera House, under the line, “Price’s Addition to Red Gap; Big Lots, Little Payments.”  It’s a very fancy house with porches and bay windows and towers and front steps, and everything, painted blue and green and yellow; and a blond lady in a purple gown, with two golden-haired tots at her side, is waving good-bye to a tall, handsome man with brown whiskers as he hurries out to the waiting street car—­though the car line ain’t built out there yet by any means.

However, Lon got up and said it was a Paradise on earth, a Heaven of Homes; that in future he would sell lots there to any native Belgian at a 20 per cent. discount; and he hoped the lucky winner of this lot would at once erect a handsome and commodious mansion on it, such as the artist had here depicted; and it would be only nine blocks from the swell little Carnegie Library when that, also, had been built, the plans for it now being in his office safe.

Quite a few of the crowd had stayed for this, and they cheered Lon and voted that little Magnesia Waterman was honest enough to draw the numbers out of a hat.  They was then drawn and read by Lon in an exciting silence—­except for Mrs. Leonard Wales, who was breathing heavily and talking to herself after each number.  She and Leonard had took a chance for a dollar and everybody there knew it by now.  She was dead sure they would get the lot.  She kept telling people so, right and left.  She said they was bound to get it if the drawing was honest.  As near as I could make out, she’d been taking a course of lessons from a professor in Chicago about how to control your destiny by the psychic force that dwells within you.  It seems all you got to do is to will things to come your way and they have to come.  No way out of it.  You step on this here psychic gas and get what you ask for.

“I already see our little home,” says Mrs. Wales in a hoarse whisper.  “I see it objectively.  It is mine.  I claim it out of the boundless all-good.  I have put myself in the correct mental attitude of reception; I am holding to the perfect All.  My own will come to me.”