The ground
was shaken under their very feet.

It was not as though the thing had been done in a corner. Hundreds of
people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been
present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father
himself, would have confirmed their story. My father, then, could
understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude
should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people,
but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who
evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at all, had
been led to throw themselves so energetically into a movement so
subversive of all their traditions, when, as it seemed to him, if they
had held out they might have pricked the balloon bubble easily enough,
and maintained everything _in statu quo_.

How, again, had they converted the King--if they had converted him? The
Queen had had full knowledge of all the preparations for the ascent. The
King had had everything explained to him. The workmen and workwomen who
had made the balloon and the gas could testify that none but natural
means had been made use of--means which, if again employed any number of
times, would effect a like result. How could it be that when the means
of resistance were so ample and so easy, the movement should nevertheless
have been irresistible? For had it not been irresistible, was it to be
believed that astute men like Hanky and Panky would have let themselves
be drawn into it?

What then had been its inner history? My father had so fully determined
to make his way back on the following evening, that he saw no chance of
getting to know the facts--unless, indeed, he should be able to learn
something from Hanky's sermon; he was therefore not sorry to find an
elderly gentleman of grave but kindly aspect seated opposite to him when
he sat down to supper.

The expression on this man's face was much like that of the early
Christians as shewn in the S. Giovanni Laterano bas-reliefs at Rome, and
again, though less aggressively self-confident, like that on the faces of
those who have joined the Salvation Army. If he had been in England, my
father would have set him down as a Swedenborgian; this being impossible,
he could only note that the stranger bowed his head, evidently saying a
short grace before he began to eat, as my father had always done when he
was in Erewhon before. I will not say that