st opportunity he supplied the gaps in his
set. They were printed not on tearable paper, but on a semi-transparent
fabric of silken, flexibility, interwoven with silk. Across them all
sprawled a facsimile of Graham's signature, his first encounter with the
curves and turns of that familiar autograph for two hundred and three
years.

Some intermediary experiences made no impression sufficiently vivid to
prevent the matter of the disarmament claiming his thoughts again;
a blurred picture of a Theosophist temple that promised MIRACLES in
enormous letters of unsteady fire was least submerged perhaps, but
then came the view of the dining hall in Northumberland Avenue. That
interested him very greatly.

By the energy and thought of Asano he was able to view this place from
a little screened gallery reserved for the attendants of the tables. The
building was pervaded by a distant muffled hooting, piping and bawling,
of which he did not at first understand the import, but which recalled
a certain mysterious leathery voice he had heard after the resumption of
the lights on the night of his solitary wandering.

He had grown accustomed now to vastness and great numbers of people,
nevertheless this spectacle held him for a long time. It was as he
watched the table service more immediately beneath, and interspersed
with many questions and answers concerning details, that the realisation
of the full significance of the feast of several thousand people came to
him.

It was his constant surprise to find that points that one might have
expected to strike vividly at the very outset never occurred to him
until some trivial detail suddenly shaped as a riddle and pointed to the
obvious thing he had overlooked. In this matter, for instance, it had
not occurred to him that this continuity of the city, this exclusion of
weather, these vast halls and ways, involved the disappearance of the
household; that the typical Victorian "home," the little brick cell
containing kitchen and scullery, living rooms and bedrooms, had, save
for the ruins that diversified the countryside, vanished as surely as
the wattle hut. But now he saw what had indeed been manifest from
the first, that London, regarded as a living place, was no longer an
aggregation of houses but a prodigious hotel, an hotel with a thousand
classes of accommodation, thousands of dining halls, chapels, theatres,
markets and places of assembly, a synthesis of enterprises, of which he