e 2500 feet above the sea, and the sun
did not get above the mountains that overhung it on the east side, till
after eight o'clock. Many persons were also starting for Sunch'ston, and
there was a procession got up by the Musical Bank Managers of the town,
who walked in it, robed in rich dresses of scarlet and white embroidered
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 b