Neville ceased to stroke the white horse and drew back a little.

“I’m afraid they’ll be expecting me home for dinner,” he said.  “I’m very pleased indeed to have met you.”  Neville was always a polite little boy.

“The very thing!” cried the white horse.  “Jump on my back and I’ll take you home.  You liked stroking me, didn’t you?  Well that’s nothing to the ride you will enjoy—­simply nothing.  Why, all the boldest riders in the world would give their ears just for one little ride on my back.  Now then!  One, two, three, and up you go!”

Then before Neville quite knew what he was doing, he made a little run and leapt up astride of the white horse.

“I live just over there,” said Neville, pointing towards his home.

But before he could say “knife”, or even “scissors” (supposing he had wished to say either of these words), the white horse laughed a nasty hollow laugh, sprang upwards from the ground, and was soaring through the air toward the dying sunset, right away from home and dinner.

Neville clung on tightly, for he was so high above the earth that to fall off would mean the end of him.  And far beneath him he saw the green fields and the white road, which now seemed like a mere thread.

“That’s not fair!  Whoa back!  Whoa back!” he shouted to the white horse; but the white horse made no reply.  Indeed, he seemed suddenly not so much like a white horse as like a white cloud shaped like a horse, and Neville saw that he no longer sat upon the horse’s silky coat, but upon something soft and downy like a white fleece, and it was slightly damp.  Then he knew that he was riding upon a cloud; and, as it was quite absurd to go on talking to a cloud, he ceased to cry out.  He just sat tight and wondered what would happen next.

He was high over a farm-house now:  one that he used to see from the bald hill.  He knew it by the tall pine-trees that grew round it; and down in the farm-yard he saw a man with a bucket going out to feed the calves.  Neville called loudly to him, but the man did not even look up.  Now he was far beyond that farm-house and above an orchard, where he saw the fruit-trees standing in straight rows; and a few seconds later the mountain range was beneath him, and Neville knew that the cloud that looked like a horse was making straight for the golden gateway, which was now glowing dully in a grey sky.  He was riding into the sunset.

Swiftly as the wind that drove it, the Cloud Horse drifted over the mountain range.  There was a sudden glow of golden light all about him, and then a flash of colour so wonderful that Neville could not bear to look.  He closed his eyes, and, as he did so, he felt that the Cloud Horse had come to a halt at last.

So Neville sat upon the cloud, not daring to open his eyes for quite a long time.  When at last he did look again he almost fainted with the wonder of it.  He was inside the sunset.