words into everybody's ears, putting them just about where he wanted them to go, as it appeared from the silence, the leaning expectancy. Just when he had come to the point where it seemed he was about to uncover his hand, he stopped.
"We'll have some more music," he said.
He continued standing while Banjo sang another song, keeping the thread of expectation in his hands, not relaxing it for a moment. Banjo's song was another one continuing his adventures with his gal, this time in a place that he called "the big cook-quarium," which was devoted to the display of fishes, gentle and monstrous. That done, with greater applause than before, the speaker resumed.
It was not medicine. The key to power was not something to sweeten the breath and enable a common, catarrhal man to marry a fortune; not something for the hair, to furnish a forlorn and plucked bachelor with a brush equal to any fox in a single night. It was nothing in this world of surprises and disappointments but a book.
The man stooped and came up with one of the inestimable volumes in his hand. It was a chunky, thick little book, with a most familiar appearance in the eyes of Louise Gardner; a tight, fat little book in a red cover with large black letters on the back. In truth, surprising, almost comical truth, it was the familiar Thousand Ways.
This man did not follow printed instructions, he did not recite the argument prepared by somebody in
