h
glutted. One might fill a dozen inconsecutive volumes with the strange
things they exhibited. Each afternoon he held his court for an hour
or so. He speedily found his interest in his contemporaries becoming
personal and intimate. At first he had been alert chiefly for
unfamiliarity and peculiarity; any foppishness in their dress, any
discordance with his preconceptions of nobility in their status and
manners had jarred upon him, and it was remarkable to him how soon that
strangeness and the faint hostility that arose from it, disappeared; how
soon he came to appreciate the true perspective of his position, and see
the old Victorian days remote and quaint. He found himself particularly
amused by the red-haired daughter of the Manager of the European
Piggeries. On the second day after dinner he made the acquaintance of a
latter-day dancing girl, and found her an astonishing artist. And after
that, more hypnotic wonders. On the third day Lincoln was moved to
suggest that the Master should repair to a Pleasure City, but this
Graham declined, nor would he accept the services of the hypnotists in
his aeronautical experiments. The link of locality held him to London;
he found a perpetual wonder in topographical identifications that he
would have missed abroad. "Here--or a hundred feet below here," he could
say, "I used to eat my midday cutlets during my London University
days. Underneath here was Waterloo and the perpetual hunt for confusing
trains. Often have I stood waiting down there, bag in hand, and stared
up into the sky above the forest of signals, little thinking I should
walk some day a hundred yards in the air. And now in that very sky that
was once a grey smoke canopy, I circle in an aeropile."

During those three days Graham was so occupied with such distractions
that the vast political movements in progress outside his quarters had
but a small share of his attention. Those about him told him little.
Daily came Ostrog, the Boss, his Grand Vizier, his mayor of the palace,
to report in vague terms the steady establishment of his rule; "a little
trouble" soon to be settled in this city, "a slight disturbance" in
that. The song of the social revolt came to him no more; he never
learned that it had been forbidden in the municipal limits; and all the
great emotions of the crow's nest slumbered in his mind.

But on the second and third of the three days he found himself, in spite
of his interest in the daughter of the