The Magic City
breakfast. This is what he thought:

- 1 cherry pie
- 2 custards in cups
- 1 cold sausage
- 2 pieces of cold toast
- 1 piece of cheese
- 2 lemon cheese-cakes
- 1 small jam tart (there was only one left)
- Butter, 1 pat

"What jolly things the servants have to eat," he said. "I never knew. I thought that nothing but mutton and rice grew here." He put all the food on a silver tray and carried it out onto the terrace, which lies between the two wings at the back of the house. Then he went back for milk, but there was none to be seen so he got a white jug full of water. The spoons he couldn't find, but he found a carving-fork and a fish-slice. 
Did you ever try to eat cherry pie with a fish-slice?

"Whatever's happened," said Philip to himself, through the cherry pie, "and whatever happens it's as well to have had your breakfast." And he bit a generous inch off the cold sausage which he had speared with the carving-fork.

And now, sitting out in the good sunshine, and growing less and less hungry as he pried fish-slice and carving-fork, his mind went back to his dream, which began to seem more and more real. Suppose it really had happened? It might have; magic things did happen, it seemed. Look how all the people had vanished out of the house - out of the world too, perhaps. "Suppose everyone's vanished," said Philip. "Suppose I'm the only person left in the world who hasn't vanished. Then everything in the world would belong to me. Then I could have everything that's in all the toy shops." And his mind for a moment dwelt fondly on this beautiful idea.

Then he went on. "But suppose I vanished too? Perhaps if I were to vanish I could see the other people who have. I wonder how it's done." He held his breath and tried hard to vanish. Have you ever tried this? It is not at all easy to do. Philip could not do it at all. He held his breath and he tried and he tried, but he only felt fatter and fatter and more and more as though in one more moment he should burst. So he let his breath go. 

"No," he said, looking at his hands; "I'm not any more 
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