ONE:Fred wanted ever so much to send home a goldfish with a very wide and beautiful tail. The fish didn't seem to be much unlike a common goldfish, except in the tail, which was triple, and looked like a piece of lace. As it swam around in the water, especially when the sun was shining on the globe, its tail seemed to have nearly as many colors as the rainbow, and both the boys were of opinion that no more beautiful fish was ever seen. But the proposal to send it to America was rather dampened by the statement of the Doctor that the experiment had been tried several times, and only succeeded in a very few instances. Almost all the fish died on the voyage over the Pacific; and even when they lived through that part of the trip, the overland journey from San Francisco to the Atlantic coast generally proved too much for them. The Japanese name for this fish is kin-giyo, and a pair of them may be bought for ten cents. It is said that a thousand dollars were offered for the first one that ever reached New York alive, which is a large advance on the price in Yokohama.Two very auspicious pieces of news awaited him when he got home, and found his wife and Alice just about to go upstairs to dress. Alices slippers had come back from the shoe-makers, and could be presented to Mr Silverdale to-night, while, as by a miracle, a bit of salmon had been procured also. Lady Keeling had been driving by that little fishmongers in Drury Place, and there on the marble slab was quite a nice bit of salmon. She had brought it home herself on the box of the victoria, for fear of there being any mischance as to its delivery. Alice was even more excited, for nobody else had ever been permitted to work Master a pair of slippers, and Julia Fyson was coming to dinner, who, with eyes green{307} with jealousy, would see the presentation made. They were to be brought into the dining-room at the end of dinner, when Lady Keeling gave two short pressures to the electric bell that stood by her on the table, by the boy covered with buttons, wrapped round with endless swathings of paper. He was to present this bale to Mr Silverdale, saying that it was immediate and asking if there was any answer. Would it not be fun to see the astonished Master take off all those wrappings, and find the Maltese crosses within?
TWO:"Yes.... Yes," Ferry kept putting in.
ONE:
TWO:So the argument had waged since the telling of Tom Driver's story. Gregg's chief difficulty was to get Allingham to see that there really might be something in this theory of a world in which merely trivial things had become permanent, whilst the cosmos itself, the hitherto unchanging outer environment of man's existence, might have opened up in many new directions. Man might have tired of waiting for a so long heralded eternity, and made one out of his own material tools. The Clockwork man, now crystallised in Gregg's mind as an unforgetable figure, seemed to him to stand for a sort of rigidity of personal being as opposed to the fickleness of mere[Pg 110] flesh and blood; but the world in which he lived probably had widely different laws, if indeed it had humanly comprehensible laws at all.He pointed to the field gate through which Gholson had come. In the field a small man was re-closing it cautiously, and now he mounted and rode away; it was Isidore Goldschmidt, of the Plank-road swamp. I was wondering why he had behaved in this skulking way, when Ferry, as if reading my thought, said, "Isidore can't afford to be found seventy-five miles inside our lines with no papers except a letter from a Yankee officer--and not knowing, himself, what's in it."
