Here I interrupted my father. "But were there," I said, "any storks?"
"Yes," he answered. "As soon as I heard Hanky's words I remembered that
a flight of some four or five of the large storks so common in Erewhon
during the summer months had been wheeling high aloft in one of those
aerial dances that so much delight them. I had quite forgotten it, but
it came back to me at once that these creatures, attracted doubtless by
what they took to be an unknown kind of bird, swooped down towards the
balloon and circled round it like so many satellites to a heavenly body.
I was fearful lest they should strike at it with their long and
formidable beaks, in which case all would have been soon over; either
they were afraid, or they had satisfied their curiosity--at any rate,
they let us alone; but they kept with us till we were well away from the
capital. Strange, how completely this incident had escaped me."
I return to my father's thoughts as he made his way back to his old camp.
As for the reversed position of Professor Panky's clothes, he remembered
having given his own old ones to the Queen, and having thought that she
might have got a better dummy on which to display them than the headless
scarecrow, which, however, he supposed was all her ladies-in-waiting
could lay their hands on at the moment.
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