but it had turned into a Stilton cheese. It was all very puzzling.
Then he had gone on tramping along the high road. What was that
about bacon and eggs? The horrible smell offended his nostrils. It
must have been a wayside inn; and a woman twenty feet high with a
face like a cauliflower--or was it spinach?--or Brussels
sprouts?--silly not to remember--one of the three, certainly--
desired to murder him with a thousand eggs bubbling up against rank
reefs of bacon. He had escaped from her somehow, and he had been
very lucky. His star had saved him. It had also saved him from a
devil on a red-hot bicycle. He had stood quite still, calm and
undismayed, in the awful path of the straddling Apollyon whose head
was girt around with yellow fire, and had seen him swerve madly and
fall off the machine. And when the devil had picked himself up, he
had tried to blast him with the Great Curse of the Underworld; but
Paul had shown him his cornelian heart, his talisman, and the devil
had remounted his glowing vehicle and had ridden away in a spume of
flame. The Father of Lies had tried to pass himself off as a
postman. The memory of the shallow pretence tickled Paul so that he
laughed; and then he half fainted in pleuritic agony.

After the interlude with the devil he could recollect little. He was
going up to London to make his fortune. A princess was waiting for
him at the golden gate of London, with a fortune piled up in a
coach-and-six. But being very sick and dizzy, he thought he would sit
down and rest in a great green cathedral whose doors stood
invitingly open . . . and now he found himself in the hospital ward.
Sometimes he felt a desire to question the blue-and-white nurse, but
it seemed too much trouble to move his lips. Then in a flash came
the solution of the puzzle, and he chuckled to himself over his
cunning. Of course it was a dream. The nurse was a dream-nurse, who