I'm to drive it back again when once it's
ready.'
'Where is it now?'
'Who's loading it?'
'How fast does it go? Are there accidents and collisions?'
'How do you find the way?'
'May I drive it with you?'
'Tell us exactly everything in the world about it--at once!'
Questions poured in a flood about him, and his imagination leaped to
their answering. Above them the curtain of the Night shook out her
million stars while they lay there talking with bated breath together.
On every single point he satisfied them, and himself as well. He told
them all--his visit to the Manor House, the sprites he found there
still alive and waiting as he had made them in his boyhood, their
songs and characters, the Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, the
Laugher, and the Woman of the Haystack, the blue-eyed Guard----
'But now her eyes are brown, aren't they?' Monkey asked, peering very
close into his face. At the same moment she took his heart and hid it
deep away among her tumbling hair.
'I was coming to that. They're brown now, of course, because in this
different atmosphere brown eyes see better than blue in the dark. The
colours of signals vary in different countries.
'And I'm the _mecanicien_,' cried Jimbo. 'I drive the engine.'
'And I'm your stoker,' he agreed, 'because here we burn wood instead
of coal, and I'm director in a wood-paving company and so know all
about it.
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