the railways, of the ships, of their agricultural estates,

their time-keepers and order-keepers, outnumbered
the neglected little forces of the old country and

municipal organisations ten to one. And they produced
flying machines. There were men alive still who could

remember the last great debate in the London House
of Commons--the legal party, the party against the

Council was in a minority, but it made a desperate
fight--and how the members came crowding out upon

the terrace to see these great unfamiliar winged
shapes circling quietly overhead. The Council had

soared to its power. The last sham of a democracy
that had permitted unlimited irresponsible property

was at an end.
Within one hundred and fifty years of Graham's

falling asleep, his Council had thrown off its disguises and
ruled openly, supreme in his name. Elections had

become a cheerfulformality, a septennial folly, an
ancient unmeaning custom; a social Parliament as

inefectual as the convocation of the Established
Church in Victorian times assembled now and then;

and a legitimate King of England, disinherited,
drunken and witless, played foolishly in a second-rate

music-hall. So the magnificent dream of the nineteenth
century, the noble project of universal individual

liberty and universal happiness, touched by a
disease of honour, crippled by a superstition of

absolute property, crippled by the religious feuds that had
robbed the common citizens of education, robbed men

of standards of conduct, and brought the sanctions
of morality to utter contempt, had worked itself

out in the face of invention and ignoble enterprise,
first to a warring plutocracy, and finally to the

rule of a supreme plutocrat. His Council at last had
ceased even to trouble to have its decrees endorsed by

the constitutional authorities, and he a motionless,
sunken, yellow-skinned figure had lain, neither dead

nor living, recognisably and immediately Master of the
Earth. And awoke at last to find himself--Master of

that inheritance! Awoke to stand under the cloudless
empty sky and gaze down upon the greatness of his

dominion.
To what end had he awakened? Was this city, this

hive of hopeless toilers, the final refutation of his
ancient hopes? Or was the fire of liberty, the fire that

had blazed and waned in the years of his past life, still
smouldering below there? He thought of the stir and

impulse of the song of the revolution. Was that song
merely the trick of a demagogue, to be forgotten when

its purpose was served? Was the hope that still stirred
within him only the memory of abandoned things, the

vestige of a creed outworn? Or had it a wider meaning,
an import interwoven with the destiny of man?

To what end had he awakened, what was there for him
to do? Humanity was spread below him like a map.

He thought of the millions and millions of humanity
following each other unceasingly for ever out of the

darkness of non-existence into the darkness of death.
To what end? Aim there must be, but it transcended

his power of thought. He saw for the first time clearly
his own infinite littleness, saw stark and terrible the

tragic contrast of human strength and the craving of
the human heart. For that little while he knew himself

for the petty accident he was, and knew therewith the
greatness of his desire. And suddenly his littleness

was intolerable, his aspiration was intolerable, and
there came to him an irresistibleimpulse to pray. And

he prayed. He prayed vague, incoherent, contradictory
things, his soul strained up through time and

space and all the fleeting multitudinous confusion of
being, towards something--he scarcely knew what--

towards something that could comprehend his striving
and endure.

A man and a woman were far below on a roof space
to the southward enjoying the freshness of the morning

air. The man had brought out a perspective glass
to spy upon the Council House and he was showing

her how to use it. Presently their curiosity was satisfied,
they could see no traces of bloodshed from their

position, and after a survey of the empty sky she came
round to the crow's nest. And there she saw two little

black figures, so small it was hard to believe they were
men, one who watched and one who gesticulated with

hands outstretched to the silent emptiness of Heaven.
She handed the glass to the man. He looked and

exclaimed:
"I believe it is the Master. Yes. I am sure. It is

the Master!"
He lowered the glass and looked at her. "Waving

his hands about almost as if he was praying. I wonder
what he is up to. Worshipping the sun? There

weren't Parses in this country in his time, were
there?"

He looked again. "He's stopped it now. It was a
chance attitude, I suppose." He put down the glass

and became meditative. "He won't have anything to
do but enjoy himself--just enjoy himself. Ostrog will

boss the show of course. Ostrog will have to, because
of leeping all these Labourer fools in bounds. Them

and their song! And got it all by sleeping, dear eyes
--just sleeping. It's a wonderful world."

CHAPTER XV
PROMINENT PEOPLE

The state apartments of the Wind Vane Keeper
would have seemed astonishingly intricate to Graham

had he entered them fresh from his nineteenth century
life, but already he was growing accustomed to the scale

of the new time. They can scarcely be described as
halls and rooms, seeing that a complicatedsystem of

arches, bridges, passages and galleries divided and
united every part of the great space. He came out

through one of the now familiar sliding panels upon a.
plateau of landing at the head of a flight of very broad

and gentle steps, with men and women far more
brilliantly dressed than any he had hitherto seen

ascending and descending. From this position he
looked down a vista of intricateornament in lustreless

white and mauve and purple, spanned by bridges that
seemed wrought of porcelain and filigree, and terminating

far off in a cloudy mystery of perforated screens.
Glancing upward, he saw tier above tier of ascending

galleries with faces looking down upon him. The
air was full of the babble of innumerable voices and of

a music that descended from above, a gay and exhilarating
music whose source he never discovered.

The central aisle was thick with people, but by no
means uncomfortably crowded; altogether that assembly

must have numbered many thousands. They were
brilliantly, even fantastically dressed, the men as

fancifully as the women, for the sobering influence of the
Puritan conception of dignity upon masculine dress

had long since passed away. The hair of the men, too,
though it was rarely worn long, was commonly curled

in a manner that suggested the barber, and baldness
had vanished from the earth. Frizzy straight-cut

masses that would have charmed Rossetti abounded,
and one gentleman, who was pointed out to Graham

under the mysterious title of an "amorist", wore his