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he, believing it infinitely better....
It was only as the train rattled them past Folkestone that he could look
out beyond his more immediate emotions, to see what had happened to the
world. He peered out of the window. "It's sunny," he said for the
twelfth time. "I couldn't ha' had better weather." And then for the
first time it dawned upon him that there were novel disproportions in
the world. "Lord sakes," he cried, sitting up and looking animated for
the first time, "but them's mortal great thissels growing out there on
the bank by that broom. If so be they be thissels? Or 'ave I been
forgetting?" But they were thistles, and what he took for tall bushes
of broom was the new grass, and amidst these things a company of British
soldiers--red-coated as ever--was skirmishing in accordance with the
directions of the drill book that had been partially revised after the
Boer War. Then whack! into a tunnel, and then into Sandling Junction,
which was now embedded and dark--its lamps were all alight--in a great
thicket of rhododendron that had crept out of some adjacent gardens and
grown enormously up the valley. There was a train of trucks on the
Sandgate siding piled high with rhododendron logs, and here it was the
returning citizen heard first of Boomfood.
As they sped out into a country again that seemed absolutely unchanged,
the two brothers were hard at their explanations. The one was full of
eager, dull questions; the other had never thought, had never troubled
to see the thing as a single fact, and he was allusive and difficult to
follow. "It's this here Boomfood stuff," he said, touching his bottom
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