my breath all the way and clenched my hands. Nothing will induce me to
try such a journey again. I would sooner go up to my room in a
balloon. And why? Because if a balloon goes wrong you have a chance,
it may spread out into a parachute after it has burst, it may catch in
a tree, a hundred and one things may happen, but if the lift falls
down its shaft you are done. As for sea-sickness I shall never be sick
again, I cannot tell you why except that I know that it is so.

And the shop in which I made this remarkable bargain, the shop to
which none return when their business is done: I set out for it next
day. Blindfold I could have found my way to the unfashionable quarter
out of which a mean street runs, where you take the alley at the end,
whence runs the cul de sac where the queer shop stood. A shop with
pillars, fluted and painted red, stands on its near side, its other
neighbour is a low-class jeweller's with little silver brooches in the
window. In such incongruous company stood the shop with beams with its
walls painted green.

In half an hour I found the cul de sac to which I had gone twice a day
for the last week, I found the shop with the ugly painted pillars and
the jeweller that sold brooches, but the green house with the three
beams was gone.

Pulled down, you will say, although in a single night. That can never
be the answer to the mystery, for the house of the fluted pillars
painted on plaster and the low-class jeweller's shop with its silver
brooches (all of which I could identify one by one) were standing side
by side.