thing, to celebrate this return to life by a dinner at some restaurant

of indisputable quality, a dinner that should be followed by all that

glittering succession of impressions the Music Halls of those days were

so capable of giving. It was a worthy plan to wipe off the more

superficial stains of the prison house by this display of free

indulgence; but so far as the second item went the plan was changed. The

dinner stood, but there was a desire already more powerful than the

appetite for shows, already more efficient in turning the man's mind

away from his grim prepossession with his past than any theatre could

be, and that was an enormous curiosity and perplexity about this

Boomfood and these Boom children--this new portentous giantry that

seemed to dominate the world. "I 'aven't the 'ang of 'em," he said.

They disturve me."

His brother had that fineness of mind that can even set aside a

contemplated hospitality. "It's your evening, dear old boy," he said.

We'll try to get into the mass meeting at the People's Palace."

And at last the man from prison had the luck to find himself wedged into

a packed multitude and staring from afar at a little brightly lit

platform under an organ and a gallery. The organist had been playing

something that had set boots tramping as the people swarmed in; but that

was over now.

Hardly had the man from prison settled into place and done his quarrel

with an importunate stranger who elbowed, before Caterham came. He

236

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth