Page:Tales of the long bow.pdf/265

 His Castle On The Soil Of England. If It Is To Be His Castle, It Must Be A Castle In The Air."

"If There Seem To Be Something Unfamiliar And Even Fanciful In The Idea, We Reply That It Is Not Half So Fantastic To Own Your Own Houses In The Clouds As Not To Own Your Own Houses On The Earth."

Then followed a passage of somewhat less solid political value, in which the acute reader might trace the influence of the poetical Mr. Pierce rather than the scientific Mr. Blair. It began "They Have Stolen the Earth; We Will Divide the Sky." But the writer followed this with a somewhat unconvincing claim to have trained rocks and swallows to hover in rows in the air to represent the hedges of "the blue meadows of the new realm," and he was so obliging as to accompany the explanation with diagrams of space showing these exact ornithological boundaries in dotted lines. There were other equally scientific documents dealing with the treatment of clouds, the diving of birds to graze on insects, and so on. The whole of this section concluded with the great social and economic slogan: "Three Acres and a Crow."