“So you say,” said a voice.

He opened his eyes.  He was in the bar of the Long Dragon, arguing about miracles with Toddy Beamish.  He had a vague sense of some great thing forgotten that instantaneously passed.  You see that, except for the loss of his miraculous powers, everything was back as it had been, his mind and memory therefore were now just as they had been at the time when this story began.  So that he knew absolutely nothing of all that is told here—­ knows nothing of all that is told here to this day.  And among other things, of course, he still did not believe in miracles.

“I tell you that miracles, properly speaking, can’t possibly happen,” he said, “whatever you like to hold.  And I’m prepared to prove it up to the hilt.”

“That’s what you think,” said Toddy Beamish, and “Prove it if you can.”

“Looky here, Mr. Beamish,” said Mr. Fotheringay.  “Let us clearly understand what a miracle is.  It’s something contrariwise to the course of nature done by power of Will...”

  XXII.

  A VISION OF JUDGMENT.

I.

Bru-a-a-a.

I listened, not understanding.

Wa-ra-ra-ra.

“Good Lord!” said I, still only half awake.  “What an infernal shindy!”

Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra Ta-ra-rra-ra.

“It’s enough,” said I, “to wake——­” and stopped short.  Where was I?

Ta-rra-rara—­louder and louder.

“It’s either some new invention——­”

Toora-toora-toora!  Deafening!

“No,” said I, speaking loud in order to hear myself.  “That’s the Last Trump.”

Tooo-rraa!

II.

The last note jerked me out of my grave like a hooked minnow.

I saw my monument (rather a mean little affair, and I wished I knew who’d done it), and the old elm tree and the sea view vanished like a puff of steam, and then all about me—­a multitude no man could number, nations, tongues, kingdoms, peoples—­children of all the ages, in an amphitheatral space as vast as the sky.  And over against us, seated on a throne of dazzling white cloud, the Lord God and all the host of his angels.  I recognised Azrael by his darkness and Michael by his sword, and the great angel who had blown the trumpet stood with the trumpet still half raised.

III.

“Prompt,” said the little man beside me.  “Very prompt.  Do you see the angel with the book?”

He was ducking and craning his head about to see over and under and between the souls that crowded round us.  “Everybody’s here,” he said.  “Everybody.  And now we shall know—­

“There’s Darwin,” he said, going off at a tangent. “He’ll catch it!  And there—­you see?—­that tall, important-looking man trying to catch the eye of the Lord God, that’s the Duke.  But there’s a lot of people one doesn’t know.