There was a terror in him lest
he should--stick. But he came out beautifully and smoothly, like a
thread of summer grass from its covering sheath.
'I _am_ slippery after all, then--slippery enough,' he remembered
saying with surprised delight, and then----
CHAPTER XV
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.
_Merchant of Venice_.
----there came to him a vivid impression of sudden light in the room,
and he knew that something very familiar was happening to him, yet
something that had not happened consciously for thirty years and more
--since his early childhood in the night-nursery with the bars across
the windows.
He was both asleep and awake at the same time. Some part of him,
rather, that never slept was disengaging itself--with difficulty. He
was getting free. Stimulated by his intercourse with the children,
this part of him that in boyhood used to be so easily detached, light
as air, was getting loose. The years had fastened it in very tightly.
Jimbo and Monkey had got at it. And Jimbo and Monkey were in the room
at this moment.
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