 it. It was like an insurrection in a gasometer.
 

                                   Chapter 21

                                  The Pilgrims

When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired; the stretching out, and
the relaxing of the long-tense muscles, how luxurious, how delicious! but that
was as far as I could get - sleep was out of the question, for the present. The
ripping and tearing and squealing of the nobility up and down the halls and
corridors was pandemonium come again, and kept me broad awake. Being awake, my
thoughts were busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy's
curious delusion. Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdom could produce;
and yet, from my point of view she was acting like a crazy woman. My land, the
power of training! of influence! of education! It can bring a body up to believe
anything. I had to put myself in Sandy's place to realize that she was not a
lunatic. Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it is to seem a
lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you have been taught. If I had
told Sandy I had seen a wagon, uninfluenced by enchantment, spin along fifty
miles an hour; had seen a man, unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket
and soar out of sight among the clouds; and had listened, without any
necromancer's help, to the conversation of a person who was several hundred
miles away, Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy, she would have
thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchantments; nobody had
any doubts; to doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants
into hogs, would have been the same as my doubting, among Connecticut people,
the actuality of the telephone and its wonders, - and in both cases would be
absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane;
that must be admitted. If I also would be sane - to Sandy - I must keep my
superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons and
telephones, to myself. Also, I believed that the world was not flat, and hadn't
pillars under it to support it, nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of
water that occupied all space above: but as I was the only person in the kingdom
afflicted with such impious and criminal opinions, I recognized that it would be
good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too, if I did not
