Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/293

 *—with the hypnotic effects of any trivial bright object when gazed at steadily, had been sufficient to induce more dreams. I could understand how it had all befallen in consonance with hackneyed laws, insane as was the outcome.

And the prelate and the personage had referred, of course, to the then-notorious nineteenth and twentieth chapters of Men Who Loved Alison, in which is described the worship of the sigil of Scoteia—and which chapters they, in common with a great many other people, considered unnecessarily to defile a noble book. The coincidence of the mirrors was quaint, but in itself came to less than nothing; for as touches the two questions as to white pigeons, the proverb alluded to by the personage, concerning the bird that fouls its own nest, is fairly familiar, and the prelate's speech was the most natural of prosaic inquiries. What these two men had said and done, in fine, amounted to absolutely nothing until transfigured in the crucible of an ardent imagination, by the curious literary notion that human life as people spend it is purposeful and clearly motived.

For what Kennaston showed me was the metal