"I'm no meddler," she said at last; "I should burn it."
"Why?"
"Because if 'twas left about, the birds might use it for their nests,
and weave it in so tight that the owner couldn't rise on Judgment
day."
So I burnt the lock of hair in her presence; because I wanted its
owner to rise on Judgment day and state a case which, after all, was
no affair of mine.
THE MAGIC SHADOW.
Once upon a time there was born a man-child with a magic shadow.
His case was so rare that a number of doctors have been disputing
over it ever since and picking his parents' histories and genealogies
to bits, to find the cause. Their inquiries do not help us much.
The father drove a cab; the mother was a charwoman and came of a
consumptive family. But these facts will not quite account for a
magic shadow. The birth took place on the night of a new moon, down
a narrow alley into which neither moon nor sun ever penetrated beyond
the third-storey windows--and that is why the parents were so long in
discovering their child's miraculous gift. The hospital-student who
attended merely remarked that the babe was small and sickly, and
advised the mother to drink sound port-wine while nursing him,--which
she could not afford.
Nevertheless, the boy struggled somehow through five years of life,
and was put into smallclothes. Two weeks after this promotion his
mother started off to scrub out a big house in the fashionable
quarter, and took him with her: for the house possessed a wide
garden, laid with turf and lined with espaliers, sunflowers, and
hollyhocks, and as the month was August, and the family away in
Scotland, there seemed no harm in letting the child run about in this
paradise while she worked.
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