of disgust of them came upon us, and we
turned away and walked round in front of the cyclist towards the Leas.

"Goodness!" cried Gibberne, suddenly; "look there!"

He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air
with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid
snail--was a bee.

And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder than ever.
The band was playing in the upper stand, though all the sound it made for
us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of prolonged last sigh that
passed at times into a sound like the slow, muffled ticking of some
monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect, strange, silent,
self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in mid-stride, promenading
upon the grass. I passed close to a little poodle dog suspended in the act
of leaping, and watched the slow movement of his legs as he sank to earth.
"Lord, look _here_!" cried Gibberne, and we halted for a moment
before a magnificent person in white faint--striped flannels, white shoes,
and a Panama hat, who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed ladies he
had passed. A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation as we could
afford, is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of alert gaiety,
and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely close, that under
its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball and a little line of
white. "Heaven give me memory," said I, "and I will never wink again."

"Or smile," said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering teeth.

"It's infernally hot, somehow," said I, "Let's go slower."

"Oh, come along!" said Gibberne.

We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people
sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses, but
the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing to see. A
purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent
struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there were many
evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were exposed to a
considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so far as our
sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from the crowd, and
turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed to a picture,
smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic wax, was
impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled me with an
irrational, an exultant sense of supe