we made faces at them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon

us, and we turned away and walked round in front of the cyclist

towards the Leas.



"Goodness!" cried Gibberne, suddenly; "look there!"



He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the

air with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally

languid snail--was a bee.



And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder

than ever. The band was playing in the upper stand, though all

the sound it made for us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of

prolonged last sigh that passed at times into a sound like the slow,

muffled ticking of some monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect,

strange, silent, self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in

mid-stride, promenading upon the grass. I passed close to a little

poodle dog suspended in the act of leaping, and watched the slow

movement of his legs as he sank to earth. "Lord, look here!" cried

Gibberne, and we halted for a moment before a magnificent person

in white faint-striped flannels, white shoes, and a Panama hat,

who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed ladies he had passed.

A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation as we could afford,

is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of alert gaiety,

and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely close,

that under its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball

and a little line of white. "Heaven give me memory," said I,

"and I will never wink again."



"Or smile," said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering teeth.



"It's infernally hot, somehow," said I. "Let's go slower."



"Oh, come along!" said Gibberne.



We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of

the people sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their

passive poses, but the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not

a restful thing to see. A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen

in the midst of a violent struggle to refold his newspaper against

the wind; there were many evidences that all these people in their

sluggish way were exposed to a considerable breeze, a breeze that

had no existence so far as our sensations went. We came out and

walked a little way from the crowd, and turned and regarded it.

To see all that multitude changed, to a picture, smitten rigid,

as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was impossibly

wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled me with an irrational,

an exultant sense of superior advantage. Consider the wonder of it!

All that I had said, and thought, and done since the stuff had begun

to work in my veins had happened, so far as those people, so far



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