magic eye, magic alone is commonplace, everything else is unknown, unguessed, and undespised.  Magic people are always obvious—­so obvious that we veteran souls can rarely understand them,—­they are never subtle, and though they are new, they are never Modern.  You may tell them in your cynical way that to-day is the only real day, and that there is nothing more unmentionable than yesterday except the day before.  They will admire your cleverness very much, but the next moment you will find the witch sobbing over Tennyson, or the wizard smiling at the quaint fancies of Sir Edwin Landseer.  You cannot really stir up magic people with ordinary human people.  You and I have climbed over our thousand lives to a too dreadfully subtle eminence.  In our day—­in our many days—­we have adored everything conceivable, and now we have to fall back on the inconceivable.  We stand our idols on their heads, it is newer to do so, and we think we prefer them upside down.  Talking constantly, we reel blindfold through eternity, and perhaps if we are lucky, once or twice in a score of lives, the blindfolding handkerchief slips, and we wriggle one eye free, and see gods like trees walking.  By Jove, that gives us enough to talk about for two or three lives!  Witches and wizards are not blinded by having a Point of View.  They just look, and are very much surprised and interested.

All witches and wizards are born strangely and die violently.  They are descended always from old mysterious breeds, from women who wrought domestic magic and perished for its sake, and from men who wrought other magic among lost causes and wars without gain, and fell and died, still surprised, still interested, with their faces among flowers.  All men who die so are not wizards, nor are all martyred and adventuring women witches, but all such bring a potential strain of magic into their line.

“A witch,” said Sarah Brown.  “Of course.  I have been trying to remember what broomsticks reminded me of.  A witch, of course.  I have always wished to be friends with a witch.”

The witch was unaware that the proper answer to this was:  “Oh, my Dear, do let’s.  Do you know I had quite a crush on you from the first minute.”  She did not answer at all, and Sarah Brown, who was tired of proper answers, was not sorry.  Nevertheless the pause seemed a little empty, so she filled it herself, saying pedantically:  “Of course I don’t believe friendship is an end in itself.  Only a means to an end.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said the witch, after wrestling conscientiously with this remark for a minute.  “Do tell me—­do you know yourself, or are you just saying it to see what it means?”

Sarah Brown was obviously damped by this, and the witch added kindly:  “I bet you twopence you don’t know what this place is.”

“A shop,” said Sarah Brown, who was sitting on the counter.

“It is a sort of convent and monastery mixed,” replied the witch.  “I am connected with it officially.  I undertook to manage it, yet I forget what the proper word for me is.  Not undertaker, is it?”