mansion among the hills. Nor can one be thrilled with the extraordinary
sense of wonder that thrilled Spinrobin when he saw the faded plush
curtain hang across the window in such a way that it might well have
wrapped the whole of Wales into a single fold, yet without extending its
skirts beyond the actual walls of the room. For what he saw apparently
involved contradictions in words, and the fact is that no description of
what he saw is really possible at all.

"Hark! By thunder!" he exclaimed, creeping out of bed with sheer stress
of excitement, while the sounds poured up through the floor as though
from cellars and tunnels where they lay stored beneath the house. They
sang and trembled about him with the menaces of a really exquisite alarm.
He moved cautiously out into the center of the room, not daring to
approach too close to the affected objects, yet furiously anxious to
discover how it was all done. For he was uncommonly "game" through it
all, and had himself well in hand from beginning to end. He was really
too excited, probably, to feel ordinary fear; it all swept him away too
mightily for that; he did not even notice the sting of the hot
candle-grease as it fell upon his bare feet.

There he stood, plucky little Spinny, steady amid this shifting world,
master of his soul amid dissolution, his hair pointing out like ruffled
feathers, his blue eyes wide open and charged with a speechless wonder,
his face pale as chalk, lips apart, jaw a trifle dropped, one hand in the
pocket of his dressing-gown, and the other holding the candle at an angle
that showered grease upon the carpet of the Rev. Philip Skale as well as
upon his own ankles. There he stood, face to face with the grotesque
horror of familiar outlines gone wrong, the altered panorama of his known
world moving about him in a strange riot of sound and form. It was, he
understood, an amazing exhibition of the transforming power of sound--of
sound playing tricks with the impermanence and the illusion of Form.
Skale was making his words good.

And behind the scenes he divined, with a shudder of genuine admiration,
the figure of the master of the ceremonies, somehow or other grown
colossal, as he had thought of him just before going to sleep--Philip
Skale, hidden in the secret places of the building, directing the
operations of this dreadful aspect of his revolutionary Discovery.... And
yet the thought brought a measure of comfort in its train, for was he not