“Why, can you not see?” said Panky, who was by way of being great at conjectural emendations.  “Can you not see how impossible it is for the Sunchild, or any of the people to whom he declared (as we now know provisionally) that he belonged, could have made the forgiveness of his own sins depend on the readiness with which he forgave other people?  No man in his senses would dream of such a thing.  It would be asking a supposed all-powerful being not to forgive his sins at all, or at best to forgive them imperfectly.  No; Yram got it wrong.  She mistook ’but do not’ for ‘as we.’  The sound of the words is very much alike; the correct reading should obviously be, ’Forgive us our trespasses, but do not forgive them that trespass against us.’  This makes sense, and turns an impossible prayer into one that goes straight to the heart of every one of us.”  Then, turning to my father, he said, “You can see this, my man, can you not, as soon as it is pointed out to you?”

My father said that he saw it now, but had always heard the words as he had himself spoken them.

“Of course you have, my good fellow, and it is because of this that I know they never can have reached you except from an Erewhonian source.”

Hanky smiled,—­snorted, and muttered in an undertone, “I shall begin to think that this fellow is a foreign devil after all.”

“And now, gentlemen,” said my father, “the moon is risen.  I must be after the quails at daybreak; I will therefore go to the ranger’s shelter” (a shelter, by the way, which existed only in my father’s invention), “and get a couple of hours’ sleep, so as to be both close to the quail-ground; and fresh for running.  You are so near the boundary of the preserves that you will not want your permit further; no one will meet you, and should any one do so, you need only give your names and say that you have made a mistake.  You will have to give it up to-morrow at the Ranger’s office; it will save you trouble if I collect it now, and give it up when I deliver my quails.

“As regards the curiosities, hide them as you best can outside the limits.  I recommend you to carry them at once out of the forest, and rest beyond the limits rather than here.  You can then recover them whenever, and in whatever way, you may find convenient.  But I hope you will say nothing about any foreign devil’s having come over on to this side.  Any whisper to this effect unsettles people’s minds, and they are too much unsettled already; hence our orders to kill any one from over there at once, and to tell no one but the Head Ranger.  I was forced by you, gentlemen, to disobey these orders in self-defence; I must trust your generosity to keep what I have told you secret.  I shall, of course, report it to the Head Ranger.  And now, if you think proper, you can give me up your permit.”