"I planted a set of blind hopes in their minds," said Prometheus, making it out to be quite a good turn that he had done to mankind. And the Dr. Relling of Ibsen, a kind of Prometheus in general practice, kept at hand a whole medicine-chest of assorted illusions to dope his patients with. "Illusion, you know," said this sage, "is the tonic to give 'em." It may be. But even illusions cost something. The bill, as Hotspur said of the river Trent, "comes me cranking in" presently, nature's iron law laying it down that the more superb your state of inflation the deeper shall the dumps occasioned by a puncture be. The Promethean gift of Mr. Dunlop to our race undoubtedly lifted the pastime of cycling out of a somewhat bumpy order of prose into a lyric heaven. And yet the stoutest of all nails could plunge itself into the solid tyre of old without compelling you to walk a foundered Pegasus from the top of the Honister Pass the whole way to Keswick, enjoying _en route_ neither the blessing of a bicycle nor that of the unhampered use of Shanks' Mare. So War, who keeps such a pump to blow you up with, and also such thorns for your puncturing, had to leave us the "poor shrunken things" that we are, anyhow. It is as if the average man had been passing himself off on himself, in a dream, as the youthful hero of some popular drama, and, in a rousing last act, had departed, in 1914, on excellent terms with himself and the audience, bands playing and flags flying, to start a noble and happy new life on the virgin soil of the "golden West." And now he awakes in the "golden West" on a slobbery and a dirty farm, with all the purchase money still to pay, and tools and manures remarkably dear, and no flag visible, nor instrument of music audible, and dismal reports coming in from neighbouring farmers, and cause and effect as abominably linked one to another as ever, and all the time his mind full of a sour surmise that many sorts of less credulous men have "made a bit" of inordinate size out of the bit that he did rather than made, during the raging and tearing run of the drama now taken off and, as far as may be, forgotten. CHAPTER XII BELATED BOONS I