cottage, of a hard-featured woman, of sitting before a fire with a blanket round his shoulders, of a toddling child smeared to the eyebrows with dirt and treacle whom he had wanted to wash.  Over and over again, lately, he had wanted to wash that child, but it had always eluded his efforts.  Once he had thought of scraping it with a bit of hoof-iron, but it had turned into a Stilton cheese.  It was all very puzzling.  Then he had gone on tramping along the high road.  What was that about bacon and eggs?  The horrible smell offended his nostrils.  It must have been a wayside inn; and a woman twenty feet high with a face like a cauliflower—­or was it spinach?—­or Brussels sprouts?—­silly not to remember—­one of the three, certainly—­ desired to murder him with a thousand eggs bubbling up against rank reefs of bacon.  He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been very lucky.  His star had saved him.  It had also saved him from a devil on a red-hot bicycle.  He had stood quite still, calm and undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and fall off the machine.  And when the devil had picked himself up, he had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; but Paul had shown him his cornelian heart, his talisman, and the devil had remounted his glowing vehicle and had ridden away in a spume of flame.  The Father of Lies had tried to pass himself off as a postman.  The memory of the shallow pretence tickled Paul so that he laughed; and then he half fainted in pleuritic agony.

After the interlude with the devil he could recollect little.  He was going up to London to make his fortune.  A princess was waiting for him at the golden gate of London, with a fortune piled up in a coach-and-six.  But being very sick and dizzy, he thought he would sit down and rest in a great green cathedral whose doors stood invitingly open . . . and now he found himself in the hospital ward.  Sometimes he felt a desire to question the blue-and-white nurse, but it seemed too much trouble to move his lips.  Then in a flash came the solution of the puzzle, and he chuckled to himself over his cunning.  Of course it was a dream.  The nurse was a dream-nurse, who wanted to make him believe that she was real.  But she was not clever enough.  The best way to pay her out for her deception was to take no notice of her whatsoever.  So comforted, he would go to sleep.

At last one morning he woke, a miserably weak but perfectly sane man, and he turned his head from side to side and looked wonderingly at the fresh and exquisite room.  A bowl of Morning Glow roses stood by his bedside, gracious things for fevered eyes to rest upon.  A few large photographs of famous pictures hung on the walls.  In front of him was the Santa Barbara of Palma Vecchio, which he recognized with a smile.  He had read about it, and knew that the original was in Venice.  Knowledge of things like that was comforting.