"And no fishing-rods!" added one of them.
"What! no guns and no rod?" I said, growing grave very suddenly. To be at Erinofka and never to hear the popping of another cartridge seemed a dreadful prospect.
"Oh, you can carry a gun if you please," said the presiding Mahatma, who was growing strangely like a London police magistrate, "but you must use smokeless and noiseless powder, and no shot."
"And a rod without a reel," said another Mahatma.
"And a line without a hook," added a third.
"And see that you have a license," put in a fourth.
"But, sirs," I began, "what am I to do with myself, if I may not----"
"Take life?" interrupted the Chairman. "Silence, prisoner at the bar, and learn to be happy without killing! To Erinofka with him, gaoler!"
"How long, your worship?" said that functionary.
Four thousand five hundred years was, I think, the figure, but it may have been four hundred thousand. I was still puzzling over the matter when I awoke. Afterwards, when I thought upon this dream of mine, it struck me that my sentence was, after all, a most enviable one. Thousands of years at Erinofka, with no terrestrial cares to weigh me down; face to face and heart to heart with Nature, learning her secrets day long; a life-atom among myriads of others; a little part of an infinite whole; harmless, free, careless, contented, in fellowship with bird and beast and insect, and with every form of life that has a vested interest in wood and moor and wet morass. For such an existence I had chosen, I thought, the right place. At any rate my spiritual essence, if weary of wandering about armed with a gun that would not work, could amuse itself by recalling those dear, unregenerate days when guns, unprohibited by stern Mahatmas, popped freely, and reels craked, and when the glad voice of the sportsman was heard upon these moors, and among them my own, together with the popping of many terrestrial cartridges. One day, especially, and that the day of my first acquaintance with the place, lingers more fondly than others in the memory, and would afford material for much spiritual contemplation, perhaps even unto forty-five thousand years, if there were nothing better to do! And it is of that particular day that I propose to tell, now that this somewhat extended preface has been got through.