A brick building is going up in Providence. The paper asked the people watching it how that is done.

Magic, they said.

They had been watching for some time and were confident. The bricks come off the pallet one at a time. They rise. They hover a moment at the height of the course. Then they adjoin — that was the word, adjoin — and the mortar is under them, and they are cemented, and the next one rises. It goes on like that all day. The onlookers compared it to Fantasia, the sequence with the brooms, and once one of them had said it the rest agreed that was exactly what it looked like.

Nobody carries the bricks. The onlookers were clear on this. They had looked.

The paper asked whether it was the same for the rest of the building. It was. Plumbing: the pipes go in and thread themselves, and where two meet there is a joint. Electrical: the wire pulls itself through the conduit and arrives at the box. Roofing: the shingles lie down in courses from the bottom up, each one overlapping the one below, which the onlookers said was the clever part. Magic, each time. They did not think it was a different magic for each trade. They thought it was the one magic, applied.

For the record: a modular brick weighs about four and a half pounds. Mortar is sand, lime, cement and water, mixed in a ratio that depends on the job. A mason lays a few hundred bricks in a day, more on a straight run and fewer at corners and openings, and is paid by the hour. The paper went to the site and stood with the onlookers for most of an afternoon. It saw the bricks rise and adjoin. It did not see a mason either.

The building is expected to be done by spring.

Magic is trading mixed. On Ball Street, Magick is soaring. Mos, a spokesperson for the exchange, has been calming the public: yes, magic exists, we've known about this for some time. Bucket Hats.