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'It is well that you have found it out, even so late as this, said a stern voice close behind them; and looking round, the children saw a tall, threatening figure, with angry eyes, and in his hand a heavy whip. 'Who is it? faltered the children to each other, with trembling voices. 'I am he who built Abracadabra, replied he of the angry eyes, brandishing his whip.
"Abracadabra!" His skill must be improving, since he got exactly what he had wished for. A full side of beef materialized against his palm, almost breaking his arm before he could snap it out of the way. The others swarmed hungrily toward it. At their expressions of wonder, Hanson felt more confidence returning to him. He concentrated and went through the little ritual again.
So glorious is the flight of the seagull that it tempts us to fling aside the dry-as-dust theories of mechanism of flexed wings, coefficient of air resistance, and all the abracadabra of the mathematical biologist, and just to give thanks for a sight so inspiring as that of gulls ringing high in the eye of the wind over hissing combers that break on sloping beaches or around jagged rocks.
Where religion is primary, however, all that worldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is irrelevant to an artist's pleasure to be warned that the beauty he expresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a mathematician's reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his supposed philosophy an abracadabra.
Conrad was about to answer, but the pert Andrew was beforehand with him and cried: "My grandfather, the smith, had a spell with abracadabra, which was to be repeated backward and forward, along with certain verses of the Bible; and when he had said these words, every thief, whether he was in the wood, on the high road, or in the field, was forced to halt on the sudden in the middle of his running, or, if he was riding on horseback, it was just the same and to wait in terrour and affright, so that even children if they chose might seize hold of him."
For them, our best established axioms would be inconceivable, would have no more meaning than that 'Abracadabra is a second intention. Science, supported by reason, assures us that the laws of nature the laws of realistic phenomena are never suspended at the prayers of man. To this conclusion the educated world is now rapidly coming.
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