“Yes,” he answered.  “As soon as I heard Hanky’s words I remembered that a flight of some four or five of the large storks so common in Erewhon during the summer months had been wheeling high aloft in one of those aerial dances that so much delight them.  I had quite forgotten it, but it came back to me at once that these creatures, attracted doubtless by what they took to be an unknown kind of bird, swooped down towards the balloon and circled round it like so many satellites to a heavenly body.  I was fearful lest they should strike at it with their long and formidable beaks, in which case all would have been soon over; either they were afraid, or they had satisfied their curiosity—­at any rate, they let us alone; but they kept with us till we were well away from the capital.  Strange, how completely this incident had escaped me.”

I return to my father’s thoughts as he made his way back to his old camp.

As for the reversed position of Professor Panky’s clothes, he remembered having given his own old ones to the Queen, and having thought that she might have got a better dummy on which to display them than the headless scarecrow, which, however, he supposed was all her ladies-in-waiting could lay their hands on at the moment.  If that dummy had never been replaced, it was perhaps not very strange that the King could not at the first glance tell back from front, and if he did not guess right at first, there was little chance of his changing, for his first ideas were apt to be his last.  But he must find out more about this.

Then how about the watch?  Had their views about machinery also changed?  Or was there an exception made about any machine that he had himself carried?

Yram too.  She must have been married not long after she and he had parted.  So she was now wife to the Mayor, and was evidently able to have things pretty much her own way in Sunch’ston, as he supposed he must now call it.  Thank heaven she was prosperous!  It was interesting to know that she was at heart a sceptic, as was also her light-haired son, now Head Ranger.  And that son?  Just twenty years of age!  Born seven months after marriage!  Then the Mayor doubtless had light hair too; but why did not those wretches say in which month Yram was married?  If she had married soon after he had left, this was why he had not been sent for or written to.  Pray heaven it was so.  As for current gossip, people would talk, and if the lad was well begotten, what could it matter to them whose son he was?  “But,” thought my father, “I am glad I did not meet him on my way down.  I had rather have been killed by some one else.”