It a man and a
woman might rise from the earth and disappear into the sky, what else
might not happen? If they had been wrong in thinking such a thing
impossible, in how much else might they not be mistaken also? The ground
was shaken under their very feet.
It was not as though the thing had been done in a corner. Hundreds of
people had seen the ascent; and even if only a small number had been
present, the disappearance of the balloon, of my mother, and of my father
himself, would have confirmed their story. My father, then, could
understand that a single incontrovertible miracle of the first magnitude
should uproot the hedges of caution in the minds of the common people,
but he could not understand how such men as Hanky and Panky, who
evidently did not believe that there had been any miracle at all, had
been led to throw themselves so energetically into a movement so
subversive of all their traditions, when, as it seemed to him, if they
had held out they might have pricked the balloon bubble easily enough,
and maintained everything _in statu quo_.
How, again, had they converted the King--if they had converted him? The
Queen had had full knowledge of all the preparations for the ascent. The
King had had everything explained to him. The workmen and workwomen who
had made the balloon and the gas could testify that none but natural
means had been made use of--means which, if again employed any number of
times, would effect a like result.
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