ttice windows,
sometimes some idle troubadour seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or
troubled about anything. Airy and dizzy though the distance was, for
Mr. Sladden seemed higher above the city than any cathedral gargoyle,
yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue: the banners floating from
every tower over the idle archers had little golden dragons all over a
pure white field.

He heard motor-buses roar by his other window, he heard the newsboys
howling.

Mr. Sladden grew dreamier than ever after that on the premises, in the
establishment of Messrs. Mergin and Chater. But in one matter he was
wise and wakeful: he made continuous and careful inquiries about the
golden dragons on a white flag, and talked to no one of his wonderful
window. He came to know the flags of every king in Europe, he even
dabbled in history, he made inquiries at shops that understood
heraldry, but nowhere could he learn any trace of little dragons _or_
on a field _argent_. And when it seemed that for him alone those
golden dragons had fluttered he came to love them as an exile in some
desert might love the lilies of his home or as a sick man might love
swallows when he cannot easily live to another spring.

As soon as Messrs. Mergin and Chater closed, Mr. Sladden used to go
back to his dingy room and gaze though the wonderful window until it
grew dark in the city and the guard would go with a lantern round the
ramparts and the night came up like velvet, full of strange stars.
Another clue he tried to obtain one night by jotting down the shapes
of the constellations, but this led him no further, for they were
unlike any that shone upon either hemisphere.

Each day as soon as he woke he went first to the wonderful window, and
there was the city, diminutive in the distance, all shining in the
morning, and the golden dragons dancing in the sun, and the archers
stretching themselves or swinging their arms on the tops of the windy
towers. The window would not open, so that he never heard the songs
that the troubadours sang down there beneath the gilded balconies; he
did not even hear the belfries' chimes, though he saw the jack-daws
routed every hour from their homes. And the first thing that he always
did was to cast his eye round all the little towers that rose up from
the ramparts to see that the little golden dragons were flying there
on their flags. And when he saw them flaunting themselves on white
folds from every tower against the marvelo