"We'll take that box," said I, "unless you charge its full value.
In which case it would need a Trust Magnate--"

"Dear heart! NO!" and the shopman swept the little men back again,
shut the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown
paper, tied up and--WITH GIP'S FULL NAME AND ADDRESS ON THE PAPER!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

"This is the genuine magic," he said. "The real thing."

"It's a little too genuine for my taste," I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still
odder the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them
inside out, and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit
of a head in the sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might. "Hey, presto!" said the Magic
Shopman, and then would come the clear, small "Hey, presto!"
of the boy. But I was distracted by other things. It was being
borne in upon me just how tremendously rum this place was; it was,
so to speak, inundated by a sense of rumness. There was something
a little rum about the fixtures even, about the ceiling, about the
floor, about the casually distributed chairs. I had a queer feeling
that whenever I wasn't looking at them straight they went askew, and
moved about, and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back.
And the cornice had a serpentine design with masks--masks altogether
too expressive for proper plaster.