"This life of ours is so insistent," said the Vicar. "It, and its petty needs, its temporary pleasures (_Crack_) swathe our souls about. While I am preaching to these people of mine of another life, some are ministering to one appetite and eating sweets, others--the old men--are slumbering, the youths glance at the maidens, the grown men protrude white waistcoats and gold chains, pomp and vanity on a substratum of carnal substance, their wives flaunt garish bonnets at one another. And I go on droning away of the things unseen and unrealised--'Eye hath not seen,' I read, 'nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the imagination of man to conceive,' and I look up to catch an adult male immortal admiring the fit of a pair of three and sixpenny gloves. It is damping year after year. When I was ailing in my youth I felt almost the assurance of vision that beneath this temporary phantasm world was the real world--the enduring world of the Life Everlasting. But now----" He glanced at his chubby white hand, fingering the stem of his glass. "I have put on flesh since then," he said. [_Pause_]. "I have changed and developed very much. The battle of the Flesh and Spirit does not trouble me as it did. Every day I feel less confidence in my beliefs, and more in God. I live, I am afraid, a quiescent life, duties fairly done, a little ornithology and a little chess, a trifle of mathematical trifling. My times are in His hands----" The Vicar sighed and became pensive. The Angel watched him, and the Angel's eyes were troubled with the puzzle of him. "Gluck, gluck, gluck," went the decanter as the Vicar refilled his glass. XIX. So the Angel dined and talked to the Vicar, and presently the night came and he was overtaken by yawning. "Yah----oh!" said the Angel suddenly. "Dear me! A higher power seemed suddenly to stretch my mouth open and a great breath of air went rushing down my throat." "You yawned," said the Vicar. "Do you never yawn in the angelic country?" "Never," said the Angel. "And yet you are immortal!----I suppose you want to go to bed." "Bed!" said the Angel. "Where's that?" So the Vicar explained darkness to him and the art of going to bed. (The Angels, it seems sleep only in order to dream, and dream, like primitive man, with their foreheads on their knees. And they sleep among the white poppy meadows in the heat of the day.) The Angel found the bedroom arrangements quaint enough.