“Fiddle!” said the Waters. “We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?” “Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve, does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects.” “Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,” said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. “Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!” “Oh, Sacred Fountains!” the Waters were fairly boiling. “He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!” “I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.” “Quite so,” said the Waters. “Then go round—hard——” “To what end?” asked the Wheel. “Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume—gassing is the proper word.” “It would be,” said the Cat, sniffing. “That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again.” “The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever,” said the Cat. “In order,” the Rat said, “that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall—er—have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life.” “Yes, Life,” said the Cat, “with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps—its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall.” “Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual,” said the laughing Waters. “_We_ sha’n’t interfere with you.” “On the tiles, forsooth!” hissed the Cat.