They
compared him to the Ancient Mariner, but none the less they were proud of
him and proud of the Englishman who had sent the manifestation. They did
not call it a Sending because Icelandic magic was not in their programme.
After sixteen kittens--that is to say, after one fortnight, for there were
three kittens on the first day to impress the fact of the Sending, the
whole camp was uplifted by a letter--it came flying through a window--from
the Old Man of the Mountains--the head of all the creed--explaining the
manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit
of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all.
He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn't even raise a
table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through
space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox,
worked and sanctioned by the highest authorities within the pale of the
creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the weaker brethren seeing
that an outsider who had been working on independent lines could create
kittens, whereas their own rulers had never gone beyond crockery--and
broken at that--were showing a desire to break line on their own trail. In
fact, there was the promise of a schism. A second round robin was drafted
to the Englishman, beginning: "Oh, Scoffer," and ending with a selection
of curses from the rites of Mizraim and Memphis and the Commination of
Jugana; who was a "fifth rounder," upon whose name an upstart "third
rounder" once traded.
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