Years ago I gave up hanging up a stocking on Christmas Eve. One reason
is that I have no stockings to hang, because I almost always wear
trousers, and even when I wear shorts I wear socks with them so as to
make my calves brown. And I don't think Father Christmas would find room
in a sock for all the things I want. So when I woke up on Christmas
morning I was rather surprised to see one of my socks hanging on the
bottom of the bed, and much more so when it got up and walked along the
counterpane towards me.
When it was over my chest it bowed deeply, and emptied out a letter
sealed with sealing wax, a turkey's egg, a tie pin with an emerald in
it, a fruit which I afterwards found out was a custard apple, and a
pocket diary. I guessed at once that the presents were from Mr Leakey,
because none of my other friends would have been able to send me things
in that way.
And when I opened the letter I found that it was an
invitation to spend the day after Boxing Day with him. Besides this he
told me what the egg and fruit were, and that the tie pin and diary had
been bewitched so that I could not lose them, which is what I generally
do with pins and diaries..
Mr Leakey greeted me warmly when I went into his room. So did Pompey
the dragon, who was sitting on the fire. He started flapping his wings
when I came in, which made the fire smoke, but Mr Leakey had only to
pick up a magic wand which was lying on the table, and Pompey at once
lay down quietly with his head between his paws.
...He handed me a
black cap with a peak to it, about the shape of the paper hats you get
out of a Christmas cracker. It was the blackest thing I have ever seen,
not a bit the colour of ordinary black cloth or paper, but like the
colour of a black hole. You could not see what it was made of, or
whether it was smooth or rough. It didn't feel like cloth or anything
ordinary, but like very soft warm india-rubber. I put it on, and at once
my arm disappeared. Everything looked slightly odd, and at first I
couldn't think why. Then I saw that the two ghostly noses which I always
see without noticing them were gone. I shut one of my eyes, as one does
if one wants to see one's nose more clearly. I felt my eye shut, but it
made no difference. Of course now that I was invisible my eyelids and
nose were quite transparent! Then I looked to where my body and legs
ought to have been, but of course I saw nothing. I got a horrid giddy
feeling and had to catch hold of the table with an invisible hand.
However I steadied myself and looked straight in front of me, and quite
soon I was able to walk round the room easily enough.
'Put the cap
in your pocket when we go out,' said my host. 'Then when you want to be
invisible, put it on under your hat. It will make that invisible all
right, just like it does your clothes.'...
...Now we're going to
visit a moneylender who calls himself Mr Macstewart. Of course that
isn't his real name. His real name's quite horrid, full of Z's. You
can't touch people with some sorts of magic unless you know their real
names. That's why moneylenders have false names, to protect themselves
against good magicians who would like to turn them into sausages or door
handles or foot-scrapers or armchairs or something useful. It's very
important to hide your real name if you have anything to do with magic,
and of course compound interest is one of the very blackest sorts of
magic. No one knows my real name, any more than they know the real name
of London. It has a secret name which only the Lord Mayor knows, and he
tells it to the new Lort Mayor each year. If a bad magician found out
its real name he would be able to turn it into Stow-on-the-Wold or
Ballybunnion or Timbuctoo or Omborombonga, which would be very awkward.
'Princes
and kings have such a lot of names because it makes it harder to
bewitch them. Of course if you enchant anyone you generally have to say
their full name, pronouncing all the bits of it properly, and you have
to get that and the spell into one breath. That's why kings and emperors
have names like Augustus Benhadad Charlemagne Dagobert Ethelwulf
Frederick Genseric Hardicanute Ixtlilcochitl Jehoiakim Kamehameha
Leonidas Maximilian Napoleon Obadiah Polycrates Quirinus Rehoboam
Subiluliuma Tarassicodissa Umsilikazi Valentinian Wenceslaus Xerxes
Yoshihito Zedekiah the hundred and seventeenth (By the way, you mayn't
know some of these kings' names. Dagobert was king of France. He was a
good king, but he wore his trousers back to front. Ixtlilcochitl was
king of Texcuca in Mexico, and an ally of Cortez. Several Kamehamehas
were kings of Hawaii. Subiluliuma was king of the Hittites.
Tarassicodissa became emperor of Constantinople, but they made him
change his name, which was Isaurian, so he called himself Zeno.
Umsilikazi was king of the Matabeles in South Africa. Some people called
him Moselikatze, and others Silkaats. All the rest come in history
books or the Bible). You haven't much breath left for a spell when
you've said that, especially if you pronounce Ixtlilcochitl and the
First X in Xerxes properly.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892 - 1964) spent
the last five years of his life in India and became an Indian citizen. A
polymath in a real sense, Haldane's best contributions are in the
mathematical theory of evolution and he is one of the founders of
population genetics.
_SBF Team
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