ing air sting his
cheeks as they raced along. There was no jolting or jarring, and the
figure seemed to cover the ground as lightly as though it hardly touched
the earth. It was certainly not a dream, he was sure of that; but the
longer they went on the drowsier he became, and the less he wondered
whether the figure was going to help him or to do something dreadful to
him. He was now thoroughly afraid, and yet, strange contradiction, he
didn't care a bit. Let the figure do what it liked; it was only a sort
of nightmare person after all, and might vanish as suddenly as it had
arrived.

For a long time they raced forward at this great speed, and then with a
bump and a crash they stopped suddenly short, and Jimbo felt himself let
down upon the solid earth. He tried to free himself at once from the
folds of the clinging substance that enveloped him, but, before he could
do so and see what his captor was really like, he heard a door slam and
felt himself pushed along what seemed to be the hallways of a house. His
eyes were clear now and he could see, but the darkness had come down
again so thickly that all he could discover was that the figure was
urging him along the floor of a large empty hall, and that they were in
a dark and empty building.

Jimbo tried hard to see his captor, but the figure, dim enough in the
uncertain light, always managed to hide its face and keep itself bunched
up in such a way that he could never see more than a great, dark mass of
a body, from which long legs and arms shot out like telescopes, draped
in a sort of clinging cloak. Now that the rapid motion through the air
had ceased, the boy's drowsiness passed a little, and he began to shiver
with fear and to feel that the tears could not be kept back much longer.

Probably in another minute he would have started to run for his life,
when a new sound caught his ears and made him listen intently, while a
feeling of wonder and delight caught his heart, and made him momentarily
forget the figure pushing him forward from behind.

Was it the wind he heard? Or was it the voices of children all singing
together very low? It was a gentle, sighing sound that rose and fell
with mournful modulations and seemed to come from the very centre of the
building; it held, too, a strange, far-away murmur, like the surge of a
faint breeze moving in the tree-tops. It might be the wind playing round
the walls of the building, or it might be children singing in hushed