‘The same number of toes! So have monkeys. Does that make us akin to monkeys?’

Presently they came back again—or were back again. He was stripped of his clothes, his wig was pulled off, he was again propelled to the jet of water and washed. The water cascaded over his head and shoulders; soapsuds exploded in his ears and stung his eyes. There must have been half a dozen of them at work on him, hissing as though they were grooming a horse and tut-tutting at the dirt ingrained on his knees and elbows. When they had washed and dried him they cut his nails, cleaned his teeth, and handed him his clothes. The clothes smelled rancid; he was averse to putting them on, but did so because he was chilled. He was also very hungry. No food appeared. Instead, there came a new relay of fingerers, who stripped him once more and began to measure him; he felt the tape slipped round him, laid along him. The hope that he was being measured for new clothes was unfounded. He was being measured from motives of biological curiosity: the length of his nose, the span of his nostrils, the girth of each toe, the exact position in relation to spine and thighbone of the mole on his buttock, the dimensions of the callus on his pen finger. They also took his pulse and counted his teeth.

The speaker was quite close. He was dressed in black, he wore a voluminous white neckcloth, he carried a most peculiar hat in a gloved hand. He had spoken to a group of ladies, who were even more oddly dressed than he, wearing white shifts down to the ground. Their waists were under their arms, the shifts fluttered in the wind and showed the shape of their legs. A couple of young men made up the party; they, too, had waists under their arms, and a general resemblance to clothes pegs. But all these were mortals.

In Elfindom the succession is determined by the dying ruler naming who is to come after her. If, by some misadventure, the declaration is not made, resort is had to divination. At sunrise half a dozen flying fairies are sent up to net larks—as many larks as there are eligible ladies, with a few over in case of accidents. During the morning the larks, one to each lady, are caged, ringed, and have leaden weights wired to their feet. On the stroke of noon the court officeholders—Chancellor, Astrologer, Keeper of the Records, Chamberlain, and so forth—wearing black hoods and accompanied by pages and cage bearers, go in torchlight procession to the Knowing Room, a stone cellar deep in the castle’s foundations, where there is a well, said to be bottomless. One by one, the larks are taken from the cages, held above the well while the name of their lady is pronounced, and then dropped in. The weights are delicately adjusted to allow the larks a brief struggle before they drown. Its duration is noted with a stopwatch by the Court Horologer and when one by one the larks have drowned, the lark which struggled longest has won the Queenship for the lady it was dedicated to. The officials throw off their mourning hoods and go back to the Throne Room, where they kiss the hand of the new Queen and drink her health from a steaming loving-cup of spiced and honeyed wine which recovers them from the cramping chill of their ordeal in the Knowing Room.