to and fro
over the great palm of God. Not ten seconds! And at last he also shrieked
beneath that pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also, even as the
Wicked Man had fled, into the shadow of the sleeve. And it was permitted
us to see into the shadow of the sleeve. And the two sat side by side,
stark of all delusions, in the shadow of the robe of God's charity, like
brothers.

And thither also I fled in my turn.

IX.

"And now," said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet he
had given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius for
a sun, "now that you understand me and each other a little better,...try
again."

Then he and his great angels turned themselves about and suddenly had
vanished...

The Throne had vanished.

All about me was a beautiful land, more beautiful than any I had ever seen
before--waste, austere, and wonderful; and all about me were the
enlightened souls of men in new clean bodies...

XXIII.

JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD.

"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But it's
happened to me--among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the _Ocean Pioneer_.
Gummy! how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll remember
anything of the _Ocean Pioneer_?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read it.
The _Ocean Pioneer_? "Something about gold dust," I said vaguely,
"but the precise--"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no business
in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh on that business.
And there'd been volcanoes or something and all the rocks was wrong.
There's places about by Soona where you fair have to follow the rocks
about to see where they're going next. Down she went in twenty fathoms
before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand pounds worth of
gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage----"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me," he said,
"but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to