And the people of the town were very much interested in the stone that had rolled by itself and had killed seventeen members of the Committee, and they made little parties and picnics all day long, taking their children to look at the stone and carrying sandwiches with them and bottles of beer.
The Magician was very angry.
“Such rubbish I never heard of,” said he when the tell-tale-tit alighted on the window-sill and told him of it. “If they want to look at anything, why can’t they come and look at me? I’m sure I’m coloured enough!”
That night the stone rose up in the thickest of the black dark, when no one at all is out of doors, except the Police—and not always him—and it smashed through the town gate and came rolling right up into the Square and lay there.
The tell-tale-tit awoke the Magician in the morning by singing the news sharply in his ear, and he went out to see. There was a great crowd in the Square, and they all cried out—
“It is a magic stone. It will bring us luck. Build it into the royal Palace.”
“I might do worse,” thought Negretti. “If good Roman cement and a double coat of magenta paint doesn’t keep it quiet nothing will.”
So he gave orders, and the stone was carted to the Palace, and built into the wall over the great gate; and while they were gone to fetch the red paint to cover up the stone and the mortar the Lord Chief Magician came out from under his bed, and went sneaking up to the Palace and in at the gate, and the stone fell on him and smashed him quite flat.
Then Perihelia came running out, and she washed the mortar off the white stone by her Sunlight Magic; and when the Magician come out she said: “Let it lie here to-night, and to-morrow, if you will let me go, I will take it away to my own kingdom, so that it shall never trouble you again.”
Negretti agreed, because he did not know what else to do, and he was beginning to despair of the Princess ever marrying him, because he had now asked her to do so every day for a month, and always with more display of plush and jewels, and she said “No” more decidedly, and even crossly, every time. So he began to lose heart.