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fixed on me. He looked into the air, and talked to whatever it was he saw. He pointed a finger at the light of the city lying beyond and below our carriage window. "All they've built," he said, "stands only on a few odd notions. Now they're changing their notions, so down comes everything with a run. And don't they look surprised and pained!" (I felt like an eavesdropper, and thought I'd better show him I was present.) I apologized for overhearing him. He nodded shortly, a little condescendingly. "We've accepted _that_"--he poked his stick towards where stood our Imperial city in the night--"as if it came by itself. We never knew our city was like that just because we never saw it in any other light. Now we're upset to find the magic-lantern picture is fading. Got to put up with it, though." His book had been on the seat. It fell to the floor, and I picked it up and handed it to him. It was _The Twilight of the Gods_. If I could have remembered at that moment one of the simple dodges for averting the evil eye I should have used it. The laughing malice of that book had so confused me for some days that I had begun to feel that even St. Paul's, a blue bubble floating over London on the stream of Time, might vanish, as bubbles will. The Hidden Hand, I began to believe, had something in it. I intrigued a serious interview with my fellow-passenger, hoping to find evidence; and then the train stopped finally, six miles from home. At that very instant of time the train which we had previously rejected because it had no engine chose to run express through the station where we stood. XX. Figure-Heads MARCH 1, 1919. When the car got to the Board of Trade Office, which is opposite the old chapel of ease where the crews of John Company's ships "used to worship," as a local history tells us, I saw Uncle Dave by the kerb, with time apparently on his hands. I got down. He told me old Jackson is dead. Jackson was a mast and block maker, but his fame was the excellence of his figure-heads. It is many years since old Jackson made one, but if it is doubted that he was an artist, there is a shop near where he once lived which still displays three of his images, the size of life, reputed to have been conjured from baulks of timber with an ax. I remember Jackson. He rarely answered you when you questioned him about those ships to which he had given personality and eyes that looked sleeplessly overseas from their prows. He
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