"Lal did send you then," shouted Ridgwell. "I knew it. How lovely!
Fancy your knowing him! Tell us all about it."
The Writer smiled. "I have known Lal almost as many years as I can remember; he is one of my oldest and very dearest friends."
"Ridgie," said Christine solemnly, at this point, "do you remember the motto of the cracker we pulled last night? It said—
"I'll whisper on this little page
A secret unto you:
The greatest wonder of the age
Shall suddenly come true."
But Ridgwell was beyond crackers, and beyond poetry; he felt, not unreasonably, amidst the development of this new wonder, that he was in possession of the real thing.
"I think," said the Writer, "I had better tell you all about it from the very beginning, but you know really it is quite a long story."
Ridgwell and Christine arranged themselves comfortably to listen; sometimes they looked at the fire, but more often at the face of the Writer, but they never missed one word of his story.
"I expect," commenced the Writer, "my story is going to be very different from anything you children may have imagined; in fact, my life has turned out so utterly different from anything it promised to be in the early beginning, that at times upon looking back it seems to be like some wonderful fairy tale—utterly unlike the ordinary fairy tales, however, one reads in books.
"The only two good fairies in my case were first and foremost our good old friend Lal, and, secondly, a gentleman who in the early stages of my life was always called the Miser, but who since has become one of the wealthiest, most generous and notable personages in the City of London. As a rule, whenever I think of my early childhood it is with a shudder, for I was running about the streets of London minus any shoes or stockings, with hardly any food save of the smallest and coarsest description, selling newspapers in the streets until late at night, and invariably soundly beaten if I did not take back some miserable coppers at the end of the day.
"I may say that these pence I had procured with so much toil were always expended in the public-house by both the man and his wife who were supposed at that time to provide me with the weird accommodation they were pleased to call home. My particular portion of this edifice was a dirty mat by way of a bed, which I shared with a rough-haired terrier dog called Sam. We two, Sam and I, were roofed in with many panes of broken glass in a species of outhouse which may at one time have formed a small conservatory. It must have been a hopeless failure, I am sure, as a conservatory, for I cannot imagine anything growing in it at all.