QUIET!
Wizard at Work
As they paused before this door with its strange admonition, the Shaggy Man and his friends heard a sound that reminded them of a buzz-saw.
"I wonder," ventured Twink, "if Conjo is building some new magical machine?"
Twiffle disregarded the little girl's question and proceeded to push the door which opened as easily as had the door of the castle.
Inside they found a vast, domed room. All around the sides of the room was a series of tables, work-benches, and tall cabinets. The tables and benches were filled with every kind of chemical instrument imaginable—beakers, retorts, test tubes, hundreds of bottles of different kinds of colored liquids, crucibles, and a series of burners over which simmered vials and pots of chemical mixtures. From these rose vari-colored vapors, filling the room with a pungent haze. The cabinet shelves were crowded and jumbled with thousands of containers of various powders, ointments, and mixtures used by wizards in working their magic spells. One cabinet contained nothing but books of magic recipes and formulas—everything from changing people into door-knobs to curing headaches.
The Shaggy Man and the children had scarcely glanced at all this array of tools and materials for working magic, when their attention was drawn to a huge divan that rested in the very middle of the marble floor of the great chamber. This luxurious divan was covered with the softest and most expensive of rich velvet robes and comforts. Curled up in a ball in the midst of the blankets and downy, satin-covered cushions was a little man. He was snoring.
Twink almost laughed aloud. So this was Conjo, the working Wizard! She realized now it was Conjo's snoring they had mistaken for the sound of a buzz-saw.