There was a tiger in papier-mache on the glass case that covered the low counter-a grave, kind-eyed tiger that waggled his head in a methodical manner there were several crystal spheres, a china hand holding magic cards, a stock of magic fish-bowls in various sizes, and an immodest magic hat that shamelessly displayed its springs. For a moment or so we were alone and could glance about us. It was a little, narrow shop, not very well lit, and the door-bell pinged again with a plaintive note as we closed it behind us.
He left the burthen of the conversation to me.
It was no common shop this it was a magic shop, and all the prancing precedence Gip would have taken in the matter of mere toys was wanting. Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we came into the shop. "It's less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles," I said, and laid my hand on the door-handle. "I could show it to Jessie," he said, thoughtful as ever of others. "If you had that?" I said at which promising inquiry he looked up with a sudden radiance. "That," he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle. Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother's breeding, and he did not propose to enter the shop or worry in any way only, you know, quite unconsciously he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear. "And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny-, only they've put it this way up so's we can't see how it's done." "Anything," said Gip, "will disappear under one of those cones.
And that"-which was The Crying Baby, Very Human -and that," which was a mystery, and called, so a neat card asserted, "Buy One and Astonish Your Friends." "If I was rich," said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing Egg, "I'd buy myself that. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn always over the way and a little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its position but here it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of Gip's pointing finger made a noise upon the glass. I had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth-a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just out of patent incubators, but there it was sure enough. I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times I had passed it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in.
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