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A few steps led up to the throne, with a wonderfully elaborate balustrade made of gold. The little mannikins seized his hands and led him up the steps between them. Then they drew back the purple curtains, and displayed a grand throne on which was seated a little girl in a snow-white dress. On her head she wore a little gold crown, from which hung a long transparent veil.
"I fancy the clouds overhead are the real earth," explained the astronomer, "and that I'm looking down into the starry heavens, with its Milky Way. I say, though, isn't it jolly up here soaring above all these moiling mannikins below wasting their precious lives grubbing in the mire dead to the glories of the universe seeking happiness and finding misery.
Then she beckoned to the Parsnip-men, and said, "You have got everything ready, have you not?" The Parsnip-men bowed low, and hurried away. In a minute or two they returned, followed by about thirty mannikins like themselves, who bore a magnificent dress which they deposited before Peter. There was a coat of blue silk, turned up with fur, and trimmed with precious stones.
Into this, the last batch of babies, or extra six girls, were stowed. Curiously enough, number 366 was an inch taller than the others. To thirty house maids was given a tray, for each was to carry twelve mannikins, and one the last six, in the Turk's Head. Instead of rich silk blankets a wooden tray, and no clothes on, must suffice.
Before the amazed patrons, she caused her tiny cardboard figures, placed near each other on chairs, to talk; she conversed with the animated mannikins while flies buzzed around the chandeliers. Then one heard the rustling of the tense audience, surprised to find itself seated and instinctively recoiling when they heard the rumbling of imaginary carriages. Des Esseintes had been fascinated.
"Fate, or Providence or whatever you are pleased to call the power that shuffles us flesh and blood mannikins around has a way of putting us all in the right places. I expect that's one of the reasons why you didn't fall in with the sort of man I was going to tell you about," said Dakota. "I don't see what Fate has to do " began Sheila, wondering at his serious tone. "Odd, isn't it?" he drawled.
The force moved steadily on towards Modderspruit, one battalion in front of the guns. "Tell Hamilton to watch his left flank," said one in authority. "The enemy are on both those hills." Sure enough, there on the crest, there dotted on the sides, were the moving black mannikins that we have already come to know afar as Boers.
The last night of this short-lived holiday-time, the party, after staying out on the lake to a later hour than usual, stood lingering still on the lawn of the villa; and their host, who was rather addicted to superficial studies of the positive sciences, including, of course, the most popular of all, astronomy, kept his guests politely listening to speculative conjectures on the probable size of the inhabitants of Sirius, that very distant and very gigantic inhabitant of heaven who has led philosophers into mortifying reflections upon the utter insignificance of our own poor little planet, capable of producing nothing greater than Shakspeares and Newtons, Aristotles and Caesars, mannikins, no doubt, beside intellects proportioned to the size of the world in which they flourish.
"What is all that to us now, as we stand here. Nothing. Nothing but a kid's toy; with little animated mannikins for a child to play with." "We've got to find Jack," said the Doctor. "Certainly we have and then get out. We're only hurting these little creatures, anyway, by being here." "But there's Rogers and Lylda," added the Doctor. "And Loto and Lylda's sister." "Take them with us.
Wherever he had gone, whatever he had been or done, that dread shadow had followed him, and now to know that instead of having to endure a hell he had to win a heaven, and to feel as if his brain had been opened and a mass of vapours and naughty little mannikins of remorse had been let out, was a trifle intoxicating even to a man of his usual vigour and early acquaintance with exciting things.
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