t it, it is likely enough she would not have been
ill pleased. But who can say?

For the rest of the evening my father was left very much to his own not
too comfortable reflections. He spent part of it in posting up the notes
from which, as well as from his own mouth, my story is in great part
taken. The good things that Yram had left with him, and his pipe, which
she had told him he might smoke quite freely, occupied another part, and
by ten o'clock he went to bed.

CHAPTER XXII: MAINLY OCCUPIED WITH A VERACIOUS EXTRACT FROM A
SUNCH'STONIAN JOURNAL

While my father was thus wiling away the hours in his cell, the whole
town was being illuminated in his honour, and not more than a couple of
hundred yards off, at the Mayor's banquet, he was being extolled as a
superhuman being.

The banquet, which was at the town hall, was indeed a very brilliant
affair, but the little space that is left me forbids my saying more than
that Hanky made what was considered the speech of the evening, and
betrayed no sign of ill effects from the bad quarter of an hour which he
had spent so recently. Not a trace was to be seen of any desire on his
part to change his tone as regards Sunchildism--as, for example, to
minimize the importance of the relic, or to remind his hearers that
though the chariot and horses had undoubtedly come down from the sky and
carried away my father and mother, yet that the earlier stage of the
ascent had been made in a balloon. It almost seemed, so George told my
father, as though he had resolved that he would speak lies, all lies, and
nothing but lies.

Panky, who was also to have spoken, was excused by the Mayor on the
ground that the great heat and the excitement of the day's proceedings
had quite robbed him of his voice.

Dr. Downie had a jumping cat before his mental vision. He spoke quietly
and sensibly, dwelling chiefly on the benefits that had already accrued
to the kingdom through the abolition of the edicts against machinery, and
the great developments which he foresaw as probable in the near future.
He held up the Sunchild's example, and his ethical teaching, to the
imitation and admiration of his hearers, but he said nothing about the
miraculous element in my father's career, on which he declared that his
friend Professor Hanky had already so eloquently enlarged as to make
further allusion to it superfluous.

The reader knows what was to happen on the following morning. The
programm