It was where his cupboard had been in which he kept his
tea-things: they were all standing on the table now. When Mr. Sladden
glanced through his new window it was late in a summer's evening; the
butterflies some while ago would have closed their wings, though the
bat would scarcely yet be drifting abroad--but this was in London: the
shops were shut and street-lamps not yet lighted.
Mr. Sladden rubbed his eyes, then rubbed the window, and still he saw
a sky of blazing blue, and far, far down beneath him, so that no sound
came up from it or smoke of chimneys, a mediaeval city set with
towers; brown roofs and cobbled streets, and then white walls and
buttresses, and beyond them bright green fields and tiny streams. On
the towers archers lolled, and along the walls were pikemen, and now
and then a wagon went down some old-world street and lumbered through
the gateway and out to the country, and now and then a wagon drew up
to the city from the mist that was rolling with evening over the
fields. Sometimes folks put their heads out of lattice windows,
sometimes some idle troubadour seemed to sing, and nobody hurried or
troubled about anything. Airy and dizzy though the distance was, for
Mr. Sladden seemed higher above the city than any cathedral gargoyle,
yet one clear detail he obtained as a clue: the banners floating from
every tower over the idle archers had little golden dragons all over a
pure white field.
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