“Very shocking.”

“It has distressed the bishop.  Martin is a hard-working man enough, and all that, but those sort of things can’t be tolerated.  The bishop told me that he had set his face against processions.”

“Quite right:  the bishop is perfectly right.  Processions are unscriptural.”

“It’s the thin end of the wedge, you know, Dixon.”

“Exactly.  I have always resisted anything of the kind here.”

“Right. Principiis obsta, you know.  Martin is so imprudent.  There’s a way of doing things.”

The “scriptural” procession led by Lord Beamys broke up when the stalls were reached, and gathered round the nobleman as he declared the bazaar open.

Lucian was sitting on a garden-seat, a little distance off, looking dreamily before him.  And all that he saw was a swarm of flies clustering and buzzing about a lump of tainted meat that lay on the grass.  The spectacle in no way interrupted the harmony of his thoughts, and soon after the opening of the bazaar he went quietly away, walking across the fields in the direction of the ancient mounds he desired to inspect.

All these journeys of his to Caermaen and its neighborhood had a peculiar object; he was gradually leveling to the dust the squalid kraals of modern times, and rebuilding the splendid and golden city of Siluria.  All this mystic town was for the delight of his sweetheart and himself; for her the wonderful villas, the shady courts, the magic of tessellated pavements, and the hangings of rich stuffs with their intricate and glowing patterns.  Lucian wandered all day through the shining streets, taking shelter sometimes in the gardens beneath the dense and gloomy ilex trees, and listening to the plash and trickle of the fountains.  Sometimes he would look out of a window and watch the crowd and color of the market-place, and now and again a ship came up the river bringing exquisite silks and the merchandise of unknown lands in the Far East.  He had made a curious and accurate map of the town he proposed to inhabit, in which every villa was set down and named.  He drew his lines to scale with the gravity of a surveyor, and studied the plan till he was able to find his way from house to house on the darkest summer night.  On the southern slopes about the town there were vineyards, always under a glowing sun, and sometimes he ventured to the furthest ridge of the forest, where the wild people still lingered, that he might catch the golden gleam of the city far away, as the light quivered and scintillated on the glittering tiles.  And there were gardens outside the city gates where strange and brilliant flowers grew, filling the hot air with their odor, and scenting the breeze that blew along the streets.  The dull modern life was far away, and people who saw him at this period wondered what was amiss; the abstraction of his glance was obvious, even to eyes not over-sharp.  But men and women had lost all their power of annoyance