In the afternoon I had a pleasant sleep in a sunny place, and went my way refreshed.
I came to a comfortable-looking inn near Canterbury. It was bright with creepers, and the landlady was a clean old woman and took my eye. I found I had just enough money to pay for my lodging with her. I decided to stop the night there. She was a talkative body, and among many other particulars I learnt she had never been to London. “Canterbury’s as far as ever I been,” she said. “I’m not one of your gad-about sort.”
“How would you like a trip to the moon?” I cried.
“I never did hold with them ballooneys,” she said, evidently under the impression that this was a common excursion enough. “I wouldn’t go up in one—not for ever so.”
This struck me as being funny. After I had supped I sat on a bench by the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brick-making, and motor cars, and the cricket of last year. And in the sky a faint new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the sun.
The next day I returned to Cavor. “I am coming,” I said. “I’ve been a little out of order, that’s all.”
That was the only time I felt any serious doubt of our enterprise. Nerves purely! After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for an hour every day. And at last, save for the heating in the furnace, our labours were at an end.