suspense of
fever in which the sick man perceives the searchlights of the world's
assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of
wreckage--one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those
beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it--the full circuit of our
orb--laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this
Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about
Huckley--where and what it might be, and how it talked--it knew how it
danced--and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the
zealous, merciless press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a
drop of pond water is exposed on the sheet of a magic-lantern show. But
Huckley's sheet was only coterminous with the use of type among mankind.
For the precise moment that was necessary, Fate ruled it that there
should be nothing of first importance in the world's idle eye. One
atrocious murder, a political crisis, an incautious or heady
continental statesman, the mere catarrh of a king, would have wiped out
the significance of our message, as a passing cloud annuls the urgent
helio. But it was halcyon weather in every respect. Ollyett and I did
not need to lift our little fingers any more than the Alpine climber
whose last sentence has unkeyed the arch of the avalanche. The thing
roared and pulverised and swept beyond eyesight all by itself--all by
itself. And once well away, the fall of kingdoms could not have
diverted it.

Ours is, after all, a kindly earth. While The Song ran and raped it with
the cataleptic kick of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,' multiplied by the West
African significance of 'Everybody's doing it,' plus twice the infernal
elementality of a certain tune in _Dona et Gamma_; when for all
practical purposes, literary, dramatic, artistic, social, municipal,
political, commercial, and administrative, the Earth _was_ flat, the
Rector of Huckley wrote to us--again as a lover of accuracy--to point
out that the Huckley vote on 'the alleged flatness of this scene of our
labours here below' was _not_ unanimous; he and the doctor having voted
against it. And the great Baron Reuter himself (I am sure it could have
been none other) flashed that letter in full to the front, back, and
both wings of this scene of our labours. For Huckley was News. _The Bun_
also contributed a photograph which cost me some trouble to fake.

'We are a vital nation,' said Ollyett while we were discussing affairs
at a B