More weary hours passed with the heathen arts of Persia, Ramon Alonzo thinking all the while of Heaven, as a boy in school thinks of the green fields. I would not convey the dullness of those hours. They passed with the exact speed with which other hours pass, if measured by those movements of the Earth by which time is recorded; but, if spiritual measurements be used, and the hours be marked by the impatience, longing, and weariness felt by Ramon Alonzo, by that measurement they passed slowly. But the impatiences of man have their endings, as each of Earth’s revolutions; and night arrived and the magician left. Whither he went Ramon Alonzo knew not; perhaps to sleep; perhaps, he thought, to commune across the gulfs with the damned. Want of sleep and too much work, far from wearying Ramon Alonzo, had lit a fever in his veins that drove him to fierce activity, and he was down by the shadow-box rapidly uttering spells. Small winds and faint sounds went by, and the moths and the owls and the stars; and the mice went round and round. And midnight came, and that solitary shape crouching above the shadow-box had uttered to the padlock all the syllables that begin with c or d. No inspiration came to lighten that labour, but he clung to his formula which was one long monotony, thousands of phrases that all began with Ting Yung. He did not look at the slow changes of night, he scarcely saw the window; and yet black branches slanted against the stars remained a memory for all his years, and the sight of branches and stars whenever he saw it afterwards would always bring to him the weariest thoughts. His mind was peopled with hopes and disappointments as the wood was peopled with little hunters going abroad through the dark; but despair never came that night, for he was determined not to admit despair till the last of the sounds was tried for the third syllable. The stars paled as with illness; with intensest weariness, as it seemed to Ramon Alonzo, the dawn dragged upwards; the voices of the birds jarred on his hearing, made delicate by fatigue; and still he murmured on. To the syllables he had tried he had added now all beginning with f and g. They had gone slower than those beginning with d, because d, as he believed, could not be followed by l, which halved the number of sounds that he had to try. And now came h which, as he hoped, could not be followed either by l or r.
Dawn grew wider. Again he felt a hopelessness at the myriad shapes of matter appearing out of the darkness, all of them possessing what he lacked so conspicuously, each master of a shadow and he alone without one. Now the sun had risen but was hidden yet by the trees. And all of a sudden the hasp of the padlock opened. The spell was Ting Yung Han.
Hastily Ramon Alonzo removed the padlock, and cautiously opened the box. It was full of shadows. He closed the box again, as he saw them flutter, and went to the window to stuff his kerchief into a broken pane so that they should not escape; then he returned to the box. Then he opened the lid of the box a little way and took out a shadow in finger and thumb by the heels, as he had seen the magician hold his. This he laid on the floor and put a small jar upon it, which he took down from a shelf, trusting any piece of matter to hold down so delicate a thing as a shadow. Then he took out another and treated it in the same way. Then a third and a fourth. They were shadows of all kinds of folk, men and women, young and old. The red sun peeped in and saw the shadowless man laying out this queer assembly and holding them one by one with little weights. They did not grow as the red sun looked at them, for they were masterless and lost. They lay there grey on the floor, fluttering limply. And then, and then, Ramon Alonzo found his
