The Wonderful Visit. H. G. Wells

tea. "What a mess it is! What a dear grotesque ugly world you live in!" said the Angel. "Fancy stuffing things into your mouth! We use our mouths just to talk and sing with. Our world, you know, is almost incurably beautiful. We get so very little ugliness, that I find all this … delightful."

      Mrs. Hinijer, the Vicar's housekeeper, looked at the Angel suspiciously when she brought in the tea. She thought him rather a "queer customer." What she would have thought had she seen him in saffron no one can tell.

      The Angel shuffled about the room with his cup of tea in one hand, and the bread and butter in the other, and examined the Vicar's furniture. Outside the French windows, the lawn with its array of dahlias and sunflowers glowed in the warm sunlight, and Mrs. Jehoram's sunshade stood thereon like a triangle of fire. He thought the Vicar's portrait over the mantel very curious indeed, could not understand what it was there for. "You have yourself round," he said, apropos of the portrait, "Why want yourself flat?" and he was vastly amused at the glass fire screen. He found the oak chairs odd—"You're not square, are you?" he said, when the Vicar explained their use. "We never double ourselves up. We lie about on the asphodel when we want to rest."

      "The chair," said the Vicar, "to tell you the truth, has always puzzled me. It dates, I think, from the days when the floors were cold and very dirty. I suppose we have kept up the habit. It's become a kind of instinct with us to sit on chairs. Anyhow, if I went to see one of my parishioners, and suddenly spread myself out on the floor—the natural way of it—I don't know what she would do. It would be all over the parish in no time. Yet it seems the natural method of reposing, to recline. The Greeks and Romans——"

      "What is this?" said the Angel abruptly.

      "That's a stuffed kingfisher. I killed it."

      "Killed it!"

      "Shot it," said the Vicar, "with a gun."

      "Shot! As you did me?"

      "I didn't kill you, you see. Fortunately."

      "Is killing making like that?"

      "In a way."

      "Dear me! And you wanted to make me like that—wanted to put glass eyes in me and string me up in a glass case full of ugly green and brown stuff?"

      "You see," began the Vicar, "I scarcely understood——"

      "Is that 'die'?" asked the Angel suddenly.

      "That is dead; it died."

      "Poor little thing. I must eat a lot. But you say you killed it. Why?"

      "You see," said the Vicar, "I take an interest in birds, and I (ahem) collect them. I wanted the specimen——"

      The Angel stared at him for a moment with puzzled eyes. "A beautiful bird like that!" he said with a shiver. "Because the fancy took you. You wanted the specimen!"

      He thought for a minute. "Do you often kill?" he asked the Vicar.