CHAPTER XIV. FROM THE CROW'S NEST
And so after strange delays and through an avenue of doubt and battle,this man from the nineteenth century came at last to his position at thehead of that complex world.
At first when he rose from the long deep sleep that followed his rescueand the surrender of the Council, he did not recognise his surroundings.By an effort he gained a clue in his mind, and all that had happenedcame back to him, at first with a quality of insincerity like a storyheard, like something read out of a book. And even before his memorieswere clear, the exultation of his escape, the wonder of his prominencewere back in his mind. He was owner of half the world; Master of theEarth. This new great age was in the completest sense his. He no longerhoped to discover his experiences a dream; he became anxious now toconvince himself that they were real.
An obsequious valet assisted him to dress under the direction of adignified chief attendant, a little man whose face proclaimed himJapanese, albeit he spoke English like an Englishman. From the latter helearnt something of the state of affairs. Already the revolution was anaccepted fact; already business was being resumed throughout the city.Abroad the downfall of the Council had been received for the most partwith delight. Nowhere was the Council popular, and the thousand citiesof Western America, after two hundred years still jealous of New York,London, and the East, had risen almost unanimously two days before atthe news of Graham's imprisonment. Paris was fighting within itself. Therest of the world hung in suspense.
While he was breaking his fast, the sound of a telephone bell jettedfrom a corner, and his chief attendant called his attention to the voiceof Ostrog making polite enquiries. Graham interrupted his refreshmentto reply. Very shortly Lincoln arrived, and Graham at once expresseda strong desire to talk to people and to be shown more of the new lifethat was opening before him. Lincoln informed him that in three hours'time a representative gathering of officials and their wives would beheld in the state apartments of the wind-vane Chief. Graham's desireto traverse the ways of the city was, however, at present impossible,because of the enormous excitement of the people. It was, however, quitepossible for him to take a bird's eye view of the city from the crow'snest of the windvane keeper. To this accordingly Graham was conductedby his attendant. Lincoln, with a graceful compliment to the attendant,apologised for not accompanying them, on account of the present pressureof administrative work.
Higher even than the most gigantic wind-wheels hung this crow's nest,a clear thousand feet above the roofs, a little disc-shaped speck on aspear of metallic filigree, cable stayed. To its summit Graham was drawnin a little wire-hung cradle. Halfway down the frail-seeming stem wasa light gallery about which hung a cluster of tubes--minute they lookedfrom above--rotating slowly on the ring of its outer rail. These werethe specula, _en rapport_ with the wind-vane keeper's mirrors, in oneof which Ostrog had shown him the coming of his rule. His Japaneseattendant ascended before him and they spent nearly an hour asking andanswering questions.
It was a day full of the promise and quality of spring. The touch of thewind warmed. The sky was an intense blue and the vast expanse of Londonshone dazzling under the morning sun. The air was clear of smoke andhaze, sweet as the air of a mountain glen.
Save for the irregular oval of ruins about the House of the Council andthe black flag of the surrender that fluttered there, the mighty cityseen from above showed few signs of the swift revolution that had, tohis imagination, in one night and one day, changed the destinies of theworld. A multitude of people still swarmed over these ruins, and thehuge openwork stagings in the distance from which started in times ofpeace the service of aeroplanes to the various great cities of Europeand America, were also black with the victors. Across a narrow way ofplanking raised on trestles that crossed the ruins a crowd of workmenwere busy restoring the connection between the cables and wires of theCouncil House and the rest of the city, preparatory to the transferthither of Ostrog's headquarters from the Wind-Vane buildings.
For the rest the luminous expanse was undisturbed. So vast was itsserenity in comparison with the areas of disturbance, that presentlyGraham, looking beyond them, could almost forget the thousands of menlying out of sight in the artificial glare within the quasi-subterraneanlabyrinth, dead or dying of the overnight wounds, forget the improvisedwards with the hosts of surgeons, nurses, and bearers feverishly busy,forget, indeed, all the wonder, consternation and novelty under theelectric lights. Down there in the hidden ways of the anthill he knewthat the revolution triumphed, that black everywhere carried the day,black favours, black banners, black festoons across the streets. And outhere, under the fresh sunlight, beyond the crater of the fight, as ifnothing had happened to the earth, the forest of Wind Vanes that hadgrown from one or two while the Council had ruled, roared peacefullyupon their incessant duty.
Far away, spiked, jagged and indented by the wind vanes, the SurreyHills rose blue and faint; to the north and nearer, the sharp contoursof Highgate and Muswell Hill were similarly jagged. And all over thecountryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedgeshad interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestledamong their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing likevast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, casttheir whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowedaway incessantly through all the arteries of the city. And underneaththese wandered the countless flocks and herds of the British Food Trustwith their lonely guards and keepers.
Not a familiar outline anywhere broke the cluster of gigantic shapesbelow. St. Paul's he knew survived, and many of the old buildings inWestminster, embedded out of sight, arched over and covered in among thegiant growths of this great age. The Themes, too, made no fall and gleamof silver to break the wilderness of the city; the thirsty water mainsdrank up every drop of its waters before they reached the walls. Its bedand estuary scoured and sunken, was now a canal of sea water and a raceof grimy bargemen brought the heavy materials of trade from the Poolthereby beneath the very feet of the workers. Faint and dim in theeastward between earth and sky hung the clustering masts of the colossalshipping in the Pool. For all the heavy traffic, for which there wasno need of haste, came in gigantic sailing ships from the ends of theearth, and the heavy goods for which there was urgency in mechanicalships of a smaller swifter sort.
And to the south over the hills, came vast aqueducts with sea waterfor the sewers and in three separate directions, ran pallid lines--theroads, stippled with moving grey specks. On the first occasion thatoffered he was determined to go out and see these roads. That would comeafter the flying ship he was presently to try. His attendant officerdescribed them as a pair of gently curving surfaces a hundred yardswide, each one for the traffic going in one direction, and made of asubstance called Eadhamite--an artificial substance, so far as he couldgather, resembling toughened glass. Along this shot a strange traffic ofnarrow rubber-shod vehicles, great single wheels, two and four wheeledvehicles, sweeping along at velocities of from one to six milesa minute. Railroads had vanished; a few embankments remained asrust-crowned trenches here and there. Some few formed the cores ofEadhamite ways.
Among the first things to strike his attention had been the great fleetsof advertisement balloons and kites that receded in irregular vistasnorthward and southward along the lines of the aeroplane journeys. Noaeroplanes were to be seen. Their passages had ceased, and only onelittle-seeming aeropile circled high in the blue distance above theSurrey Hills, an unimpressive soaring speck.
A thing Graham had already learnt, and which he found very hard toimagine, was that nearly all the towns in the country, and almost allthe villages, had disappeared. Here and there only, he understood,some gigantic hotel-like edifice stood amid square miles of some singlecultivation and preserved the name of a town--as Bournemouth, Wareham,or Swanage. Yet the officer had speedily convinced him how inevitablesuch a change had been. The old order had dotted the country withfarmhouses, and every two or three miles was the r
uling landlord'sestate, and the place of the inn and cobbler, the grocer's shop andchurch--the village. Every eight miles or so was the country town,where lawyer, corn merchant, wool-stapler, saddler, veterinary surgeon,doctor, draper, milliner and so forth lived. Every eight miles--simplybecause that eight mile marketing journey, four there and back, was asmuch as was comfortable for the farmer. But directly the railways cameinto play, and after them the light railways, and all the swift newmotor cars that had replaced waggons and horses, and so soon as the highroads began to be made of wood, and rubber, and Eadhamite, and all sortsof elastic durable substances--the necessity of having such frequentmarket towns disappeared. And the big towns grew. They drew the workerwith the gravitational force of seemingly endless work, the employerwith their suggestions of an infinite ocean of labour.
And as the standard of comfort rose, as the complexity of the mechanismof living increased life in the country had become more and more costly,or narrow and impossible. The disappearance of vicar and squire, theextinction of the general practitioner by the city specialist, hadrobbed the village of its last touch of culture. After telephone,kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book, schoolmaster,and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to livean isolated savage. In the country were neither means of being clothednor fed (according to the refined conceptions of the time), no efficientdoctors for an emergency, no company and no pursuits.
Moreover, mechanical appliances in agriculture made one engineer theequivalent of thirty labourers. So, inverting the condition of the cityclerk in the days when London was scarce inhabitable because of thecoaly foulness of its air, the labourers now came hurrying by road orair to the city and its life and delights at night to leave it again inthe morning. The city had swallowed up humanity; man had entered upon anew stage in his development. First had come the nomad, the hunter, thenhad followed the agriculturist of the agricultural state, whose townsand cities and ports were but the headquarters and markets of thecountryside. And now, logical consequence of an epoch of invention,was this huge new aggregation of men. Save London, there were onlyfour other cities in Britain--Edinburgh, Portsmouth, Manchester andShrewsbury. Such things as these, simple statements of fact though theywere to contemporary men, strained Graham's imagination to picture. Andwhen he glanced "over beyond there" at the strange things that existedon the Continent, it failed him altogether.
He had a vision of city beyond city, cities on great plains, citiesbeside great rivers, vast cities along the sea margin, cities girdled bysnowy mountains. Over a great part of the earth the English tongue wasspoken; taken together with its Spanish American and Hindoo and Negroand "Pidgin" dialects, it was the everyday language of two-thirds ofthe people of the earth. On the Continent, save as remote and curioussurvivals, three other languages alone held sway--German, which reachedto Antioch and Genoa and jostled Spanish-English at Gdiz, a GallicisedRussian which met the Indian English in Persia and Kurdistan and the"Pidgin" English in Pekin, and French still clear and brilliant, thelanguage of lucidity, which shared the Mediterranean with the IndianEnglish and German and reached through a negro dialect to the Congo.
And everywhere now, through the city-set earth, save in the administered"black belt" territories of the tropics, the same cosmopolitan socialorganisation prevailed, and everywhere from Pole to Equator his propertyand his responsibilities extended. The whole world was civilised; thewhole world dwelt in cities; the whole world was property. Over theBritish Empire and throughout America his ownership was scarcelydisguised, Congress and Parliament were usually regarded as antique,curious gatherings. And even in the two Empires of Russia and Germany,the influence of his wealth was conceivably of enormous weight. There,of course, came problems--possibilities, but, uplifted as he was, evenRussia and Germany seemed sufficiently remote. And of the quality of theblack belt administration, and of what that might mean for him hethought, after the fashion of his former days, not at all. That itshould hang like a threat over the spacious vision before him could notenter his nineteenth century mind. But his mind turned at once from thescenery to the thought of a vanished dread. "What of the yellow peril?"he asked and Asano made him explain. The Chinese spectre had vanished.Chinaman and European were at peace. The twentieth century haddiscovered with reluctant certainty that the average Chinaman was ascivilised, more moral, and far more intelligent than the averageEuropean serf, and had repeated on a gigantic scale the fraternisationof Scot and Englishman that happened in the seventeenth century. AsAsano put it; "They thought it over. They found we were white men afterall." Graham turned again to the view and his thoughts took a newdirection.
Out of the dim south-west, glittering and strange, voluptuous, andin some way terrible, shone those Pleasure Cities, of which thekinematograph-phonograph and the old man in the street had spoken.Strange places reminiscent of the legendary Sybaris, cities of art andbeauty, mercenary art and mercenary beauty, sterile wonderful citiesof motion and music, whither repaired all who profited by the fierce,inglorious, economic struggle that went on in the glaring labyrinthbelow.
Fierce he knew it was. How fierce he could judge from the fact thatthese latter-day people referred back to the England of the nineteenthcentury as the figure of an idyllic easy-going life. He turned his eyesto the scene immediately before him again, trying to conceive the bigfactories of that intricate maze.
Northward he knew were the potters, makers not only of earthenware andchina, but of the kindred pastes and compounds a subtler mineralogicalchemistry had devised; there were the makers of statuettes and wallornaments and much intricate furniture; there too were the factorieswhere feverishly competitive authors devised their phonograph discoursesand advertisements and arranged the groupings and developments for theirperpetually startling and novel kinematographic dramatic works. Thence,too, flashed the world-wide messages, the world-wide falsehoods of thenews-tellers, the chargers of the telephonic machines that had replacedthe newspapers of the past.
To the westward beyond the smashed Council House were the voluminousoffices of municipal control and government; and to the eastward,towards the port, the trading quarters, the huge public markets, thetheatres, houses of resort, betting palaces, miles of billiard saloons,baseball and football circuses, wild beast rings and the innumerabletemples of the Christian and quasi-Christian sects, the Mahomedans,Buddhists, Gnostics, Spook Worshippers, the Incubus Worshippers, theFurniture Worshippers, and so forth; and to the south again a vastmanufacture of textiles, pickles, wines and condiments. And from pointto point tore the countless multitudes along the roaring mechanicalways. A gigantic hive, of which the winds were tireless servants, andthe ceaseless wind-vanes an appropriate crown and symbol.
He thought of the unprecedented population that had been sucked up bythis sponge of halls and galleries--the thirty-three million lives thatwere playing out each its own brief ineffectual drama below him, and thecomplacency that the brightness of the day and the space and splendourof the view, and above all the sense of his own importance had begotten,dwindled and perished. Looking down from this height over the cityit became at last possible to conceive this overwhelming multitude ofthirty-three millions, the reality of the responsibility he would takeupon himself, the vastness of the human Maelstrom over which his slenderkingship hung.
He tried to figure the individual life. It astonished him to realise howlittle the common man had changed in spite of the visible change in hisconditions. Life and property, indeed, were secure from violence almostall over the world, zymotic diseases, bacterial diseases of all sortshad practically vanished, everyone had a sufficiency of food andclothing, was warmed in the city ways and sheltered from the weather--somuch the almost mechanical progress of science and the physicalorganisation of society had accomplished. But the crowd, he was alreadybeginning to discover, was a crowd still, helpless in the hands ofdemagogue and organiser, individually cowardly, individually swayed byappetite, collectively incalculable. The memory of countless figures inpale b
lue canvas came before his mind. Millions of such men and womenbelow him, he knew, had never been out of the city, had never seenbeyond the little round of unintelligent grudging participation in theworld's business, and unintelligent dissatisfied sharing in its tawdrierpleasures. He thought of the hopes of his vanished contemporaries,and for a moment the dream of London in Morris's quaint old _Newsfrom Nowhere_, and the perfect land of Hudson's beautiful _CrystalAge_--appeared before him in an atmosphere of infinite loss. He thoughtof his own hopes.
For in the latter days of that passionate life that lay now so farbehind him, the conception of a free and equal manhood had become a veryreal thing to him. He had hoped, as indeed his age had hoped, rashlytaking it for granted, that the sacrifice of the many to the few wouldsome day cease, that a day was near when every child born of womanshould have a fair and assured chance of happiness. And here, aftertwo hundred years, the same hope, still unfulfilled, cried passionatelythrough the city. After two hundred years, he knew, greater than ever,grown with the city to gigantic proportions, were poverty and helplesslabour and all the sorrows of his time.
Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years.He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse ofsupernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of publichonour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief inGod had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venialworld.
His Japanese attendant, Asano, in expounding the political history ofthe intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten byinsect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorouslyenough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under the skin, andbehold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape with an active grubinside that has eaten out its substance. And then comes some secondaryparasite, some ichneumon fly, and lays an egg within this grub, andbehold! that, too, is a hollow shape, and the new living thing is insideits predecessor's skin which itself is snug within the seed coat. Andthe seed coat still keeps its shape, most people think it a seed still,and for all one knows it may still think itself a seed, vigorous andalive. "Your Victorian kingdom," said Asano, "was like that--kingshipwith the heart eaten out. The landowners--the barons and gentry--beganages ago with King John; there were lapses, but they beheaded KingCharles, and ended practically with King George mere husk of a king...the real power in the hands of their parliament. But the Parliament--theorgan of the land-holding tenant-ruling gentry--did not keep itspower long. The change had already come in the nineteenth century. Thefranchises had been broadened until it included masses of ignorantmen, 'urban myriads,' who went in their featureless thousands to votetogether. And the natural consequence of a swarming constituency is therule of the party organisation. Power was passing even in the Victoriantime to the party machinery, secret, complex, and corrupt. Very speedilypower was in the hands of great men of business who financed themachines. A time came when the real power and interest of the Empirerested visibly between the two party councils, ruling by newspapers andelectoral organisations--two small groups of rich and able men, workingat first in opposition, then presently together."
There was a reaction of a genteel ineffectual sort. There werenumberless books in existence, Asano said, to prove that--thepublication of some of them was as early as Graham's sleep--a wholeliterature of reaction in fact. The party of the reaction seems tohave locked itself into its study and rebelled with unflinchingdetermination--on paper. The urgent necessity of either capturing ordepriving the party councils of power is a common suggestion underlyingall the thoughtful work of the early twentieth century, both in Americaand England. In most of these things America was a little earlier thanEngland, though both countries drove the same way.
That counter-revolution never came. It could never organise and keeppure. There was not enough of the old sentimentality, the old faith inrighteousness, left among men. Any organisation that became big enoughto influence the polls became complex enough to be undermined, brokenup, or bought outright by capable rich men. Socialistic and Popular,Reactionary and Purity Parties were all at last mere Stock Exchangecounters, selling their principles to pay for their electioneering. Andthe great concern of the rich was naturally to keep property intact, theboard clear for the game of trade. Just as the feudal concern hadbeen to keep the board clear for hunting and war. The whole world wasexploited, a battle field of businesses; and financial convulsions, thescourge of currency manipulation, tariff wars, made more human miseryduring the twentieth century--because the wretchedness was dreary lifeinstead of speedy death--than had war, pestilence and famine, in thedarkest hours of earlier history.
His own part in the development of this time he now knew clearly enough.Through the successive phases in the development of this mechanicalcivilisation, aiding and presently directing its development, there hadgrown a new power, the Council, the board of his trustees. At first ithad been a mere chance union of the millions of Isbister and Warming, amere property holding company, the creation of two childless testators'whims, but the collective talent of its first constitution had speedilyguided it to a vast influence, until by title deed, loan and share,under a hundred disguises and pseudonyms it had ramified through thefabric of the American and English States.
Wielding an enormous influence and patronage, the Council had earlyassumed a political aspect; and in its development it had continuallyused its wealth to tip the beam of political decisions and its politicaladvantages to grasp yet more and more wealth. At last the partyorganisations of two hemispheres were in its hands; it became an innercouncil of political control. Its last struggle was with the tacitalliance of the great Jewish families. But these families were linkedonly by a feeble sentiment, at any time inheritance might fling a hugefragment of their resources to a minor, a woman or a fool, marriages andlegacies alienated hundreds of thousands at one blow. The Council had nosuch breach in its continuity. Steadily, steadfastly it grew.
The original Council was not simply twelve men of exceptional ability;they fused, it was a council of genius. It struck boldly for riches,for political influence, and the two subserved each other. With amazingforesight it spent great sums of money on the art of flying, holdingthat invention back against an hour foreseen. It used the patent laws,and a thousand half-legal expedients, to hamper all investigators whorefused to work with it. In the old days it never missed a capable man.It paid his price. Its policy in those days was vigorous--unerring,and against it as it grew steadily and incessantly was only the chaoticselfish rule of the casually rich. In a hundred years Graham had becomealmost exclusive owner of Africa, of South America, of France, ofLondon, of England and all its influence--for all practical purposes,that is--a power in North America--then the dominant power in America.The Council bought and organised China, drilled Asia, crippled the OldWorld empires, undermined them financially, fought and defeated them.
And this spreading usurpation of the world was so dexterouslyperformed--a proteus--hundreds of banks, companies, syndicates, maskedthe Council's operations--that it was already far advanced before commonmen suspected the tyranny that had come. The Council never hesitated,never faltered. Means of communication, land, buildings, governments,municipalities, the territorial companies of the tropics, every humanenterprise, it gathered greedily. And it drilled and marshalled its men,its railway police, its roadway police, its house guards, and drain andcable guards, its hosts of land-workers. Their unions it did not fight,but it undermined and betrayed and bought them. It bought the worldat last. And, finally, its culminating stroke was the introduction offlying.
When the Council, in conflict with the workers in some of its hugemonopolies, did something flagrantly illegal and that without even theordinary civility of bribery, the old Law, alarmed for the profits ofits complaisance, looked about it for weapons. But there were nomore armies, no fighting navies; the age of Peace had come. Theonly possible war ships were the great steam vessels of the Council'sNavigation Trust. The police forces
they controlled; the police ofthe railways, of the ships, of their agricultural estates, theirtime-keepers and order-keepers, outnumbered the neglected little forcesof the old country and municipal organisations ten to one. And theyproduced flying machines. There were men alive still who could rememberthe 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 desperatefight--and how the members came crowding out upon the terrace to seethese great unfamiliar winged shapes circling quietly overhead. TheCouncil had soared to its power. The last sham of a democracy that hadpermitted unlimited irresponsible property was at an end.
Within one hundred and fifty years of Graham's falling asleep, hisCouncil had thrown off its disguises and ruled openly, supreme in hisname. Elections had become a cheerful formality, a septennial folly,an ancient unmeaning custom; a social Parliament as ineffectual as theconvocation of the Established Church in Victorian times assembled nowand then; and a legitimate King of England, disinherited, drunkenand witless, played foolishly in a second-rate music-hall. So themagnificent dream of the nineteenth century, the noble project ofuniversal individual liberty and universal happiness, touched by adisease of honour, crippled by a superstition of absolute property,crippled by the religious feuds that had robbed the common citizens ofeducation, robbed men of standards of conduct, and brought the sanctionsof morality to utter contempt, had worked itself out in the face ofinvention and ignoble enterprise, first to a warring plutocracy, andfinally to the rule of a supreme plutocrat. His Council at lasthad ceased even to trouble to have its decrees endorsed by theconstitutional authorities, and he a motionless, sunken, yellow-skinnedfigure had lain, neither dead nor living, recognisably and immediatelyMaster of the Earth. And awoke at last to find himself--Master of thatinheritance! Awoke to stand under the cloudless empty sky and gaze downupon the greatness of his dominion.
To what end had he awakened? Was this city, this hive of hopelesstoilers, the final refutation of his ancient hopes? Or was the fire ofliberty, the fire that had blazed and waned in the years of his pastlife, still smouldering below there? He thought of the stir and impulseof the song of the revolution. Was that song merely the trick of ademagogue, to be forgotten when its purpose was served? Was the hopethat still stirred within him only the memory of abandoned things,the vestige of a creed outworn? Or had it a wider meaning, an importinterwoven with the destiny of man? To what end had he awakened, whatwas there for him to do? Humanity was spread below him like a map. Hethought of the millions and millions of humanity following each otherunceasingly for ever out of the darkness of non-existence into thedarkness of death. To what end? Aim there must be, but it transcendedhis power of thought. He saw for the first time clearly his own infinitelittleness, saw stark and terrible the tragic contrast of human strengthand the craving of the human heart. For that little while he knewhimself for the petty accident he was, and knew therewith the greatnessof his desire. And suddenly his littleness was intolerable, hisaspiration 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 andall the fleeting multitudinous confusion of being, towards something--hescarcely knew what--towards something that could comprehend his strivingand endure.
A man and a woman were far below on a roof space to the southwardenjoying the freshness of the morning air. The man had brought out aperspective glass to spy upon the Council House and he was showing herhow to use it. Presently their curiosity was satisfied, they could seeno traces of bloodshed from their position, and after a survey of theempty sky she came round to the crow's nest. And there she saw twolittle black figures, so small it was hard to believe they were men,one who watched and one who gesticulated with hands outstretched to thesilent 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 almostas 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, Isuppose." He put down the glass and became meditative. "He won't haveanything to do but enjoy himself--just enjoy himself. Ostrog will bossthe show of course. Ostrog will have to, because of keeping all theseLabourer fools in bounds. Them and their song! And got it all bysleeping, dear eyes--just sleeping. It's a wonderful world."