The Face in the Frost

If I were serious I would never have become a wizard, would I?

He lived in a huge, ridiculous, doodad-covered, trash-filled two-story horror of a house that stumbled, staggered, and dribbled right up to the edge of a great shadowy forest

On a shelf over the experiment table there was the inevitable skull, which the wizard put their to remind him of death, though it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist.

He selected one of these incantations and began to chant in a loud, wailing voice. All the clocks in the house suddenly went off at once, though it was only three-twenty; the copper pots hanging in the kitchen clanged and whanged against each other; and a couple of the wizard’s books fell off their shelves with a clump. But nothing else happened. Prospero slammed the magic book shut and slumped into an overstuffed chair. He fumbled in his smoking stand for his pipe and tobacco. “I learned that spell fifty years ago,” he mumbled as he lit his pipe. “And I still don’t know what it’s for.

He had taken the precaution of closing the inside shutters of the only window, and his staff, though it leaned lightly on the door, was capable of keeping out anyone who did not want to smash his way in with an ax.

When he had brushed a thin coat of dust off the pebbled leather cover of one volume, he saw the words: Register of All Wizards and Warlocks of the South Kingdom and of the North Kingdom from the Beginning of the World to the Present Time.

Nahum bobbed again. 'My crest is cropped by croaking cranes. I go to drown in doleful dumps, dead-drunk with drearihead.

The two weary but still talkative wizards sat in a pair of fan-backed chairs and pitched pebbles at the drunken satyr in the fountain. They talked about wars, enchantments, and obscure facts until the sky above the forest began to be fringed with pale blue.

I do not think, Prospero,' he said, 'that one should attribute a very high degree of reality to your house.

I learned that spell fifty years ago,' he mumbled as he lit his pipe. 'And I still don't know what it's for.

and so, I went to work on a brazen head that was going to tell me how to encircle England with a wall of brass, to keep out marauding Danes and other riffraff.