“’Ssh!” said a little woman near us, scowling.  “Hear this blessed Saint!”

VIII.

“He was Lord of the Earth, but I was the prophet of the God of Heaven,” cried the Saint, “and all the people marvelled at the sign.  For I, O God, knew of the glories of thy Paradise.  No pain, no hardship, gashing with knives, splinters thrust under my nails, strips of flesh flayed off, all for the glory and honour of God.”

God smiled.

“And at last I went, I in my rags and sores, smelling of my holy discomforts——­”

Gabriel laughed abruptly.

“And lay outside his gates, as a sign, as a wonder——­”

“As a perfect nuisance,” said the Recording Angel, and began to read, heedless of the fact that the saint was still speaking of the gloriously unpleasant things he had done that Paradise might be his.

And behold, in that book the record of the Saint also was a revelation, a marvel.

It seemed not ten seconds before the Saint also was rushing to and fro over the great palm of God.  Not ten seconds!  And at last he also shrieked beneath that pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also, even as the Wicked Man had fled, into the shadow of the sleeve.  And it was permitted us to see into the shadow of the sleeve.  And the two sat side by side, stark of all delusions, in the shadow of the robe of God’s charity, like brothers.

And thither also I fled in my turn.

IX.

“And now,” said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet he had given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius for a sun, “now that you understand me and each other a little better,...try again.”

Then he and his great angels turned themselves about and suddenly had vanished...

The Throne had vanished.

All about me was a beautiful land, more beautiful than any I had ever seen before—­waste, austere, and wonderful; and all about me were the enlightened souls of men in new clean bodies...

  XXIII.

  JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD.

“It isn’t every one who’s been a god,” said the sunburnt man.  “But it’s happened to me—­among other things.”

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

“It don’t leave much for ambition, does it?” said the sunburnt man.

“I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer.  Gummy! how time flies!  It’s twenty years ago.  I doubt if you’ll remember anything of the Ocean Pioneer?”

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read it.  The Ocean Pioneer?  “Something about gold dust,” I said vaguely, “but the precise—­”

“That’s it,” he said.  “In a beastly little channel she hadn’t no business in—­dodging pirates.  It was before they’d put the kybosh on that business.  And there’d been volcanoes or something and all the rocks was wrong.  There’s places about by Soona where you fair have to follow the rocks about to see where they’re going next.  Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another.”