"After they've gone to pieces here?" "That's the general belief, you know." "People, like the woman who screamed out of the door, and the blackfaced man and his volutations and the horrible little things that threw husks!--certainly not. _I_ never saw such creatures before I fell into this world." "Oh! but come!" said the Doctor. "You'll tell me next your official robes are not white and that you can't play the harp." "There's no such thing as white in the Angelic Land," said the Angel. "It's that queer blank colour you get by mixing up all the others." "Why, my dear Sir!" said the doctor, suddenly altering his tone, "you positively know nothing about the Land you come from. White's the very essence of it." The Angel stared at him. Was the man jesting? He looked perfectly serious. "Look here," said Crump, and getting up, he went to the sideboard on which a copy of the Parish Magazine was lying. He brought it round to the Angel and opened it at the coloured supplement. "Here's some _real_ angels," he said. "You see it's not simply the wings make the Angel. White you see, with a curly whisp of robe, sailing up into the sky with their wings furled. Those are angels on the best authority. Hydroxyl kind of hair. One has a bit of a harp, you see, and the other is helping this wingless lady--kind of larval Angel, you know--upward." "Oh! but really!" said the Angel, "those are not angels at all." "But they _are_," said Crump, putting the magazine back on the sideboard and resuming his seat with an air of intense satisfaction. "I can assure you I have the _best_ authority...." "I can assure you...." Crump tucked in the corners of his mouth and shook his head from side to side even as he had done to the Vicar. "No good," he said, "can't alter our ideas just because an irresponsible visitor...." "If these are angels," said the Angel, "then I have never been in the Angelic Land." "Precisely," said Crump, ineffably self-satisfied; "that was just what I was getting at." The Angel stared at him for a minute round-eyed, and then was seized for the second time by the human disorder of laughter. "Ha, ha, ha!" said Crump, joining in. "I _thought_ you were not quite so mad as you seemed. Ha, ha, ha!" And for the rest of the lunch they were both very merry, for entirely different reasons, and Crump insisted upon treating the Angel as a "dorg" of the highest degree. XXX. After the Angel had left Crump's house he went up the hill again towards the Vicarage. But--possibly moved by the desire to avoid Mrs Gustick--he turned aside at the stile and made a detour by the Lark's Field and Bradley's Farm.