And with no word more the old labourer stumped across the
room, opened wide the double window that looked on the Tuileries
gardens and, flashing back over his shoulder one look that was full of
scorn, stumped away up through the air at an angle of forty degrees.
Peters and Santiago saw him bear to his left from the window; passing
diagonally over the Rue de Rivoli and over a corner of the Tuileries
gardens; they saw him clear the Louvre, and thence they dumbly watched
him still slanting upwards, stepping out with a firmer and more
confident stride as he dwindled and dwindled away with his old brown
coat.
Neither spoke till he was no more than a speck in the sky far away
over Paris going South Eastwards.
"Well I am blowed," said Peters.
But Santiago sadly shook his head. "I knew it was a good coat," he
said. "I _knew_ it was a good coat."
AN ARCHIVE OF THE OLDER MYSTERIES
It is told in the Archive of the Older Mysteries of China that one of
the house of Tlang was cunning with sharpened iron and went to the
green jade mountains and carved a green jade god. And this was in the
cycle of the Dragon, the seventy-eighth year.
And for nearly a hundred years men doubted the green jade god, and
then they worshipped him for a thousand years; and after that they
doubted him again, and the green jade god made a miracle and whelmed
the green jade mountains, sinking them down one evening at sunset into
the earth so that there is only a marsh where the green jade mountains
were.
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