Five of the Sages were already exercising, or standing under the showers with expressions of enjoyment or endurance. Lord Sombrewater was thorough but silent, and occupied himself with the punch-ball. Fulke Arnott, deep-chested, long-armed, bow-legged and hairy as an ape, felt his limbs with closed eyes and imagined himself a piece of Pheidias. Sprot, the pot-bellied and knock-kneed, produced in his throat a noise which he called singing, and Ambrose presumes that he felt in the remnant of his soul some echo of what in an ancestor may have been a free impulse. Terence stood under the fresh-water shower like a Druid. His exercises were those prescribed for occultists, and his mind, as the element drenched him, was concentrated on the purity of the element. Then he moved to the sea-water shower, and concentrated on salt health. When he had finished he moved over and stood by the rail, tall and stately, shading his eyes and gazing into the rising sun. Far and wide the little dark waves broke idly in tiny jets and sprays of white foam. “We float, not on water,” he was heard to say, “but on meadows of snowdrops and deep-leaved violets.” Sir Richard Frew-Gaff was most amiable of the Sages at that time of the day. With his higher centres a little relaxed from the preceding day’s contemplation of physical reality, and warm with anticipation of another day’s work, he appeared benevolently, as it were, in the world of living phenomena, and cracked a couple of jokes. At the moment he was hanging by the knees on the horizontal bar and hailed Ambrose, passing in his white towel from the shower. “Hallo, Ambrose!” “Hallo!” The pale blue eyes of the scientist were looking at him upside down. “You’re pinker than ever—like a pink cherub in a white cloud.” Sir Richard swung and landed erect on the mat. “What’s the secret of your morning freshness, Ambrose? You must sleep like the sainted dead in paradise. Do you dream at all?” “Not unless I want to.” “Well, I envy you. I do not sleep too well nowadays.” Ambrose would not expect to sleep, he tells us, if his brains were full of imaginations that chained him to the world of physical appearance. Then Arthur Ravenhill came gravely from his cabin. He did not use the gymnastic apparatus. The functions of his body, assimilative and excretory, were regulated by the operations of his mind. He digested consciously, and his exercises took place in his inside. He was able to perform gymnastic feats with his liver and kidneys, and had in mind to achieve the supreme accomplishment and reverse the processes of the alimentary canal. He was very thin. He had the air, in fact, of one who has attained a considerable degree of self-mortification, and he was able at any time of the day or night to discipline himself into one of the four trances. “Morning,” said Lord Sombrewater. “Didn’t see you yesterday.”