hands; and presently, under the agreeable massage, her purring increased
while she dwindled and dwindled to the size of a small, fluffy kitten,
then vanished entirely, leaving in his hand a tiny white mouse. This
mouse he tossed into the air, where it became no mouse at all but a white
butterfly that fluttered 'round and 'round, alighting at last on the
window curtain and hung there, opening and closing its snowy wings.

"That's all very well," he reflected, gloomily, as, at a pass of his
hand, the air was filled with canary birds; "that's all very well, but
suppose I should slip up? What I need is to rehearse to somebody before I
face two or three hundred people."

He thought he heard a knocking on his door, and listened a moment. But as
there was an electric bell there he concluded he had been mistaken; and
picking up the other white cat, he began a gentle massage that stimulated
her purring, apparently at the expense of her color and size, for in a
few moments she also dwindled until she became a very small, coal-black
kitten, changing in a twinkling to a blackbird, when he cast her
carelessly toward the ceiling. It was well done; in all India no magician
could have done it more cleverly, more casually.

Leaning forward in his chair he reproduced the two white cats from behind
him, put the kittens back in their box, caught the blackbird and caged
it, and was carefully winding up the hairspring in the white butterfly,
when again he fancied that somebody was knocking.

[Illustration]