ad come; Sir Thomas's park gate-pillars still violently
declaring 'The Earth _is_ flat,' were as mean, as average, as ordinary
as the photograph of a room where a murder has been committed. Ollyett,
who, of course, knew the place specially well, made the most of it to
us. Bat, who had employed it as a back-cloth to one of his own dramas,
dismissed it as a thing used and emptied, but Woodhouse expressed my
feelings when he said: 'Is that all--after all we've done?'

'_I_ know,' said Ollyett soothingly. '"Like that strange song I heard
Apollo sing: When Ilion like a mist rose into towers." I've felt the
same sometimes, though it has been Paradise for me. But they
_do_ suffer.'

The fourth brake in thirty minutes had just turned into Sir Thomas's
park to tell the Hall that 'The _Earth_ was flat'; a knot of obviously
American tourists were kodaking his lodge-gates; while the tea-shop
opposite the lych-gate was full of people buying postcards of the old
font as it had lain twenty years in the sexton's shed. We went to the
alcoholic pub and congratulated the proprietor.

'It's bringin' money to the place,' said he. 'But in a sense you can buy
money too dear. It isn't doin' us any good. People are laughin' at us.
That's what they're doin'.... Now, with regard to that Vote of ours you
may have heard talk about....'

'For Gorze sake, chuck that votin' business,' cried an elderly man at
the door. 'Money-gettin' or no money-gettin', we're fed up with it.'

'Well, I do think,' said the publican, shifting his ground, 'I do think
Sir Thomas might ha' managed better in some things.'

'He tole me,'--the elderly man shouldered his way to the bar--'he tole
me twenty years ago to take an' lay that font in my tool-shed. He _tole_
me so himself. An' now, after twenty years, me own wife makin' me out
little better than the common 'angman!'

'That's the sexton,' the publican explained. 'His good lady sells the
postcards--if you 'aven't got some. But we feel Sir Thomas might ha'
done better.'

'What's he got to do with it?' said Woodhouse.

'There's nothin' we can trace 'ome to 'im in so many words, but we think
he might 'ave saved us the font business. Now, in regard to that votin'
business--'

'Chuck it! Oh, chuck it!' the sexton roared, 'or you'll 'ave me cuttin'
my throat at cock-crow. 'Ere's another parcel of fun-makers!'

A motor-brake had pulled up at the door and a multitude of men and
women immediately descended. We went