e electric light turned on. Mr. Wace asked questions, and
suggested observations to clear up difficult points. Nothing, indeed,
could have been less visionary and more matter-of-fact.

The attention of Mr. Cave had been speedily directed to the bird-like
creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier
visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered for
a time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then he
thought, grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their heads
were round, and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one of them that
had so startled him on his second observation. They had broad, silvery
wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed
fish and with the same subtle play of colour, and these wings were not
built on the plan of bird-wing or bat, Mr. Wace learned, but supported
by curved ribs radiating from the body. (A sort of butterfly wing with
curved ribs seems best to express their appearance.) The body was small,
but fitted with two bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles,
immediately under the mouth. Incredible as it appeared to Mr. Wace, the
persuasion at last became irresistible, that it was these creatures
which owned the great quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden
that made the broad valley so splendid. And Mr. Cave perceived that the
buildings, with other peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great
circular windows, which opened freely, gave the creatures egress and
entrance. They would alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a
smallness almost rod-like, and hop into the interior. But among them was
a multitude of smaller-winged creatures, like great dragon-flies and
moths and flying beetles, and across the greensward brilliantly-coloured
gigantic ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the
causeways and terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater
winged flies, but wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their
hand-like tangle of tentacles.

Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts that
stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon Mr. Cave,
after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one particularly
vivid day, that the glittering object there was a crystal exactly like
that into which he peered. And a still more careful scrutiny convinced
him that each one in a vista of nearly twenty carried a s