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 the Colonel, "but I'm not at all sure I see what you are driving at."

"What we have seen is another impossible thing," said Owen Hood; "a thing that common speech has set up as a challenge; a thing that a thousand rhymes and jokes and phrases have called impossible. We have seen pigs fly."

"It's pretty extraordinary," admitted Crane, "but it's not so extraordinary as their not being allowed to walk."

And they gathered their travelling tackle together and began to descend the steep hill.

In doing so, they descended into a deeper twilight between the stems of the darkling trees; the walls of the valley began to close over them, as it were, and they lost that sense of being in the upper air in a radiant topsy-turvydom of clouds. It was almost as if they had really had a vision; and the voice of Crane came abruptly out of the dusk, almost like that of a doubter when he speaks of a dream.

"The thing I can't understand," he said abruptly, "is how Hilary managed to do all that by himself."

"He really is a very wonderful fellow," said Hood. "You told me yourself he did wonders in the War. And though he turns it to these