Avon Fantasy Reader No. 12 — page 83: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

to fit the magical window into his only room that it occarred to Sr. Sladden’s mind that he did not want a window. And then they were at the door of the house in which he rented a room, and it seemed too Jate to explain. The stranger demanded privacy while he fitted up the window, so Mr. Sladden remained outside the door at the top of a little flight of creaky stairs. He heard no sound of hammering. And presently the strange old man came out with his faded yellow robe aud his great beard, and his eyes on far-off places. “It is finished,” he said, and he and the young man parted. And whether he remained a spol of colour aud anachronisin in London, or whether he ever caine again to Baghdad, and what dark hands kept on the circulation of lis twenty-five-and-six, Mr. Sladden never knew. Mr. Sladden entered the bare-boarded room in which he slept and spent all his indoor hours between closing-timne and the hour al which Messrs. Mergin and Chater commenced. To the Penates of so dingy a room his neat frock-coat must have been a continual wonder. Mr. Sladden took it off and folded it carefully; and there was the old man’s window rather high up in the wall. There had been no window in that wall hitherto, nor any ornament at all but a small cupboard, so when Mr. Sladden had put his frock-coat safely away he glanced through his new window. It was where his cupboard had been in which he kept his tea-things: they were all standing on the table now. When Mr. Sladden glanced through his new window it was late in a sumuer’s evening; the butterflies some while ago would have closed their wings, though the bats would scarcely yet be drifting abroad—but Mis was in London: the shops were shut and street-lamps not yet lighted. Mr. Sladden rubbed his eyes, then rubbed the window, and still he saw a sky of blazing blue, and far, far down beneath him, so that no sound came up from it or smoke of chimneys, a mediaeval city set with towers. Brown roofs and cobbled streets, and then white walls and buttresses, and beyond them bright green fields and tiny streams. On the towers archers lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and now and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lum- bered through the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the ficlds. Sometimes folk put their heads out of lattice windows, sometimes some idle troubadour sccmed to sing, and no- body hurried or troubled about anything. Airy and dizzy Rood the distance was, for Mr. Sladden scemed higher above the city than any cathedral gargoyle, yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue: the banners floating from every tower over the idle archers bad litile golden dragons all over a pure white field. He heard motor-buses roar by his other window, he heard the news- boys howling. 81 comicbooks.com