the aperture came, like the sudden chatter of a bird, the high, nasal,
but well-bred voice of Barker.

"I said to him quite plainly--the public interests--"

Auberon turned on Wayne with violence.

"What the devil is all this? What am I saying? What are you saying?
Have you hypnotised me? Curse your uncanny blue eyes! Let me go. Give
me back my sense of humour. Give it me back--give it me back, I say!"

"I solemnly assure you," said Wayne, uneasily, with a gesture, as if
feeling all over himself, "that I haven't got it."

The King fell back in his chair, and went into a roar of Rabelaisian
laughter.

"I don't think you have," he cried.

BOOK III

CHAPTER I--_The Mental Condition of Adam Wayne_

A little while after the King's accession a small book of poems
appeared, called "Hymns on the Hill." They were not good poems, nor
was the book successful, but it attracted a certain amount of
attention from one particular school of critics. The King himself, who
was a member of the school, reviewed it in his capacity of literary
critic to "Straight from the Stables," a sporting journal. They were
known as the Hammock School, because it had been calculated
malignantly by an enemy that no less than thirteen of their delicate
criticisms had begun with the words, "I read this book in a hammock:
half asleep in the sleepy sunlight, I ..."; after that there were
important differences. Under these conditions they liked everything,
but especially everything silly. "Next to authentic goodness in a
book," they said--"next to authentic goodness in a book (and that,
alas! we never find) we desire a rich badness." Thus it happened that
their praise (as indicating the presence of a rich badness) was not
universally sought after, and authors became a little disquieted when
they found the eye of the Hammock School fixed upon them with peculiar
favour.

The peculiarity of "Hymns on the Hill" was the celebration of the
poetry of London as distinct from the poetry of the country. This
sentiment or affectation was, of course, not uncommon in the twentieth
century, nor was it, although sometimes exaggerated, and sometimes
artificial, by any means without a great truth at its root, for there
is one respect in which a town must be more poetical than the country,
since it is closer to the spirit of man; for London, if it be not one
of the masterpieces of man, is at least one of his sins. A street is
really more poetical than