us as that of the station clock, which
was wearing a paper mask, said that the engine of my train had, in fact,
gone. It had gone to Brighton. He did not know why. It had gone alone. I
turned vacantly from this bewilderment and saw a man with the sort of
golden beard an immortal might have worn standing under a station lamp,
and breaking now and then into peals of merriment, occasioned, it seemed
to me, by what the first porter was telling him. Then both of them looked
towards me, and stopped. If in one more gust of hearty laughter that
hollow wilderness of a station had vanished, gloom and dreary echoes and
frozen lights, and I had found myself blinking in a surprising sunlight
at that fellow in the golden beard, while he continued to laugh at me in
another world than this, where he was revealed for what he was, I was in
the mind for placid acceptance. Well, the miraculous transformation was
as likely as an engine for that train.

The bearded one approached me. I did not run away. I waited for the next
thing. He had a book under his arm, and it is likely that the gods, who
have no need to learn the truth, never read books. "If," he told me, "you
want to get to Sheepwash, you had better take this other train. It is
going half the way. The engine for the train for Sheepwash can't be
found."

We both boarded the train for half the journey, and it did not appear to
have any other passengers. Yet, reckless of the risks I was taking in
travelling alone with a suspected being at such a time--for where might
not he and the train go?--I accepted the chance; and as I took my seat
and regarded that bright beard, the shadow of my awful doubt became
really serious, for it was only this week that I have been reading _The
Twilight of the Gods_. There was the disintegrating recollection of that
book, with its stories of homeless immortals in search of new and more
profitable employ; and there had been a bodiless voice in a motor lorry
which ignored what I said but spoke instead to an inconsequential memory
of mine that was strictly private; and there was the levity with which
uniformed officials treated the essential institutions of civilization.
All this gave me the sensation that even the fixed policy of our strong
government might, at any moment now, roll up as a scroll.

Off we went. My fellow-traveller was silent, though he was smiling at
something which was not in the carriage, to my knowledge. When he spoke,
his eyes were not