picked up the unexploded bonnet-box and with a single magnificent gesture (he told us afterwards he thought there was a river beneath) hurled it over the parapet of the bridge, ere he ran across the road towards the village green.  Now, the station platform immediately below was crowded with Foresters and their friends waiting to welcome a delegation from a sister Court.  I saw the box burst on the flint edging of the station garden and the contents sweep forward cone-wise like shrapnel.  But the result was stimulating rather than sedative.  All those well-dressed people below shouted like Sodom and Gomorrah.  Then they moved as a unit into the booking-office, the waiting-rooms, and other places, shut doors and windows and declaimed aloud, while the incoming train whistled far down the line.

I pivoted round cross-legged on the back seat, like a Circassian beauty beneath her veil, and saw Penfentenyou, his coat-collar over his ears, dancing before a shut door and holding up handfuls of currency to a silver-haired woman at an upper window, who only mouthed and shook her head.  A little child, carrying a kitten, came smiling round a corner.  Suddenly (but these things moved me no more than so many yards of three-penny cinematograph-film) the kitten leaped spitting from her arms, the child burst into tears, Penfentenyou, still dancing, snatched her up and tucked her under his coat, the woman’s countenance blanched, the front door opened, Penfentenyou and the child pressed through, and I was alone in an inhospitable world where every one was shutting windows and calling children home.

A voice cried:  ’You’ve frowtened ’em!  You’ve frowtened ’em!  Throw dust on ’em and they’ll settle!’

I did not desire to throw dust on any created thing.  I needed both hands for my draperies and two more for my stockings.  Besides, the bees were doing me no hurt.  They recognised me as a member of the County Bee-keepers’ Association who had paid his annual subscription and was entitled to a free seat at all apicultural exhibitions.  The quiver and the churn of the hireling car, or it might have been the lurching banners and the arrogant big drum, inclined many of them to go up street, and pay court to the advancing Foresters’ band.  So they went, such as had not followed Mr. Lingnam in his flight toward the green, and I looked out of two goggled eyes instead of half a one at the approaching musicians, while I listened with both ears to the delayed train’s second whistle down the line beneath me.

The Forester’s band no more knew what was coming than do troops under sudden fire.  Indeed, there were the same extravagant gestures and contortions as attend wounds and deaths in war; the very same uncanny cessations of speech—­for the trombone was cut off at midslide, even as a man drops with a syllable on his tongue.  They clawed, they slapped, they fled, leaving behind them a trophy of banners and brasses crudely arranged round the big drum.  Then that