with much gold thread.  There was a banner displaying an open chariot in which the Sunchild and his bride were seated, beaming with smiles, and in attitudes suggesting that they were bowing to people who were below them.  The chariot was, of course, drawn by the four black and white horses of which the reader has already heard, and the balloon had been ignored.  Readers of my father’s book will perhaps remember that my mother was not seen at all—­she was smuggled into the car of the balloon along with sundry rugs, under which she lay concealed till the balloon had left the earth.  All this went for nothing.  It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.  Painters, my father now realised, can do all that historians can, with even greater effect.

Women headed the procession—­the younger ones dressed in white, with veils and chaplets of roses, blue cornflower, and pheasant’s eye Narcissus, while the older women were more soberly attired.  The Bank Managers and the banner headed the men, who were mostly peasants, but among them were a few who seemed to be of higher rank, and these, for the most part, though by no means all of them, wore their clothes reversed—­as I have forgotten to say was done also by Mr. Balmy.  Both men and women joined in singing a litany the words of which my father could not catch; the tune was one he had been used to play on his apology for a flute when he was in prison, being, in fact, none other than “Home, Sweet Home.”  There was no harmony; they never got beyond the first four bars, but these they must have repeated, my father thought, at least a hundred times between Fairmead and Sunch’ston.  “Well,” said he to himself, “however little else I may have taught them, I at any rate gave them the diatonic scale.”

He now set himself to exploit his fellow-traveller, for they soon got past the procession.

“The greatest miracle,” said he, “in connection with this whole matter, has been—­so at least it seems to me—­not the ascent of the Sunchild with his bride, but the readiness with which the people generally acknowledged its miraculous character.  I was one of those that witnessed the ascent, but I saw no signs that the crowd appreciated its significance.  They were astounded, but they did not fall down and worship.”

“Ah,” said the other, “but you forget the long drought and the rain that the Sunchild immediately prevailed on the air-god to send us.  He had announced himself as about to procure it for us; it was on this ground that the King assented to the preparation of those material means that were necessary before the horses of the sun could attach themselves to the chariot into which the balloon was immediately transformed.  Those horses might not be defiled by contact with this gross earth.  I too witnessed the ascent; at the moment, I grant you, I saw neither chariot