When it lifted I was in the village once more, and once more it was different.  It was on fire, and it seemed infinitely larger and more straggling than when I had arrived.  The moon was still in the sky, but the air had a chilly touch.  Instead of one church there was an infinite number of churches, for in the glare countless minarets and small cupolas were visible.  There was no crowd, no voices, and no shouting; only a long line of low, blazing wooden houses.  The place was deserted and silent save for the crackling blaze.  Then down the street a short, fat man on horseback rode towards us.  He was riding a white horse.  He wore a grey overcoat and a cocked hat.  I became aware of a rhythmical tramping:  a noise of hundreds and hundreds of hoofs, a champing of bits, and the tramp of innumerable feet and the rumble of guns.  In the distance there was a hill with crenelated battlements round it; it was crowned with the domes and minarets of several churches, taller and greater than all the other churches in sight.  These minarets shone out clean-cut and distinct against the ruddy sky.

The short man on horseback looked back for a moment at this hill.  He took a pinch of snuff.

THE CONQUEROR

When the ancient gods were turned out of Olympus, and the groan of dying Pan shook the world like an earthquake, none of the fallen deities was so disconsolate as Proserpine.  She wandered across the world, assuming now this shape and now that, but nowhere could she find a resting-place or a home.  In the Southern country which she regarded as her own, whatever shape or disguise she assumed, whether that of a gleaner or of an old woman begging for alms, the country people would scent something uncanny about her and chase her from the place.  Thus it was that she left the Southern country, which she loved; she said farewell to the azure skies, the hills covered with corn and fringed everywhere with rose bushes, the white oxen, the cypress, the olive, the vine, the croaking frogs, and the million fireflies; and she sought the green pastures and the woods of a Northern country.

One evening, not long after her arrival (it was Midsummer Eve), as she was wandering in a thick wood, she noticed that the trees and the under-growth were twinkling with a myriad soft flames which reminded her of the fireflies of her own country, and presently she perceived that these flames were stars which, soft as dew and bright as moonbeams, formed the diadems crowning the hair of unearthly shapes.  These shapes were like those of men and maidens, transfigured and rendered strange and delicate, as light as foam, and radiant as dragonflies hovering over a pool.  They were rimmed with rainbow-coloured films, and sometimes they flew and sometimes they danced, but they rarely seemed to touch the ground.  And as Proserpine approached them, in the sad majesty of her fallen divinity, they gathered round her in a circle and bowed down before her.  And one of them, taller than the rest, advanced towards her and said:—­