'Reaction!' But Queen Mab, after this crowning insult, was fain to depart from Britain and renounce the higher civilisation. In the Councils of the New Democracy she had no place. Church and State abjured her: the rising generation needed no fairies, but was content with football and cricket, 'Treasure Island,' and the Latin Grammar. Education, Philosophy, and the Philistines had made of the island she once loved well a wilderness wherein no fairy might henceforth furl its wings. She said 'good-bye' to the Owl, who shed one tear at parting, and to all the loyal birds, and went back to Samoa. But alas! Samoa, like Great Britain, was no longer any place for her. It was annexed: it was evangelised. The natives of it were going to church; they were going to Sunday School; they were going to heaven. They were sending their children to be educated at English colleges: they were translating Tennyson and Wesley's sermons, and learning the catechism, and reading the Testament in the original Greek, and wearing high-crowned hats and paper collars. There was no end of the things they were doing, and they had no time for fairies. Queen Mab summoned her Court together in despair, and left for one of the Admiralty Islands. There, till the civilisation that dogs the steps of the old folk-lore has driven her thence—with constitutions, and microscopes, and a higher Pantheism that leaves the older Pantheism in the lurch, and other advantages of the nineteenth century—she is secure. We trust that she is also happy, and that the shadow of the approaching hour when she will be ultimately reduced by scientific theologians to a symbol of some deeper verity, the conception of men whose understandings could not cope, like ours, with abstract truth, is not cast heavily upon her path. For she knows well, now, that her day is over, that she is too tangible by far for a higher Pantheism, and that only among the heathen, in some obscure corner of Oceania, she is still permitted to linger on, till that lagging island too receives its chrism of intellect, and is caught up into the van of time. The Owl is yet the wisest of the birds, though he has commenced a course of psychological research that, it is to be feared, if persisted in, will seriously injure his brain. For he said, only yesterday, that as he was conscious of external objects merely through the medium of his own ego, how was he to know whether or not his own ego was the sole ego in the universe—in fact, composed the universe? He wished to be informed whether he could possibly be nothing but an impression or somebody else's ego; and said finally, in a despondent tone, that it was hopeless to regard this mundane scheme as anything but a subjective phenomenon, mere _Schein_ or _maya_, and that he gave it up.