of the town in the night. Not a single street-lamp

had 1'ccu lit for two days, and the archway of the gate was only a mass of darkness in the vague form of a r. in which I heard low, dismal groans, that ed to answer the murmurs of a man's voice. "I recognized something impassive and careless in me, characteristic of that Genoese sailor who, like me. has come casually here to be drawn into the events for which his scepticism as well as mine seems to en- tin a sort of passive contempt. The only thing he seems to care for, as far as I have been able to dis- r, is to be well spoken of. An ambition fit for noble souls, but also a profitable one for an exceptional- ly intelligent scoundrel. Yes. His very words. 'To be well spoken of. Si, señor.' He does not seem to make any difference between speaking and thinking Is it sheer naiveness or the practical point of view, I wonder? Exceptional individualities always interest IK, because they are true to the general formula ex- preosing the moral state of humanity. " He joined me on the harbor road after I had passed them under the dark archway without stopping. It was a woman in trouble he had been talking to. Through discretion I kept silent while he walked by myside. After a time he began to talk himself. It was not what I expected. It was only an old woman, an old lace-maker, in search of her son, one of the t-sweepers employed by the municipality. Friends come the day before at daybreak to the door of r hovel calling him out. He had gone with them. . she had not seen him since; so she had left the

food she had been preparing half-cooked on the cx-