glasses we could see the blue ribbon on his neck and a patch of white
on his brown chest. The bay was waking up. The smokes of morning fires

stood in faint spirals higher than the heads of palms; people moved
between the houses; a herd of buffaloes galloped clumsily across a

green slope; the slender figures of boys brandishing sticks appeared
black and leaping in the long grass; a coloured line of women, with

water bamboos on their heads, moved swaying through a thin grove of
fruit-trees. Karain stopped in the midst of his men and waved his

hand; then, detaching himself from the splendid group, walked alone to
the water's edge and waved his hand again. The schooner passed out to

sea between the steep headlands that shut in the bay, and at the same
instant Karain passed out of our life forever.

But the memory remains. Some years afterwards I met Jackson, in the
Strand. He was magnificent as ever. His head was high above the crowd.

His beard was gold, his face red, his eyes blue; he had a wide-brimmed
gray hat and no collar or waistcoat; he was inspiring; he had just

come home--had landed that very day! Our meeting caused an eddy in the
current of humanity. Hurried people would run against us, then walk

round us, and turn back to look at that giant. We tried to compress
seven years of life into seven exclamations; then, suddenly appeased,

walked sedately along, giving one another the news of yesterday.
Jackson gazed about him, like a man who looks for landmarks, then

stopped before Bland's window. He always had a passion for firearms;
so he stopped short and contemplated the row of weapons, perfect and

severe, drawn up in a line behind the black-framed panes. I stood by
his side. Suddenly he said--

"Do you remember Karain?"
I nodded.

"The sight of all this made me think of him," he went on, with his
face near the glass . . . and I could see another man, powerful and

bearded, peering at him intently from amongst the dark and polished
tubes that can cure so many illusions. "Yes; it made me think of him,"

he continued, slowly. "I saw a paper this morning; they are fighting
over there again. He's sure to be in it. He will make it hot for the

caballeros. Well, good luck to him, poor devil! He was perfectly
stunning."

We walked on.
"I wonder whether the charm worked--you remember Hollis's charm, of

course. If it did . . . Never was a sixpence wasted to better
advantage! Poor devil! I wonder whether he got rid of that friend of

his. Hope so. . . . Do you know, I sometimes think that--"
I stood still and looked at him.

"Yes . . . I mean, whether the thing was so, you know . . . whether it
really happened to him. . . . What do you think?"

"My dear chap," I cried, "you have been too long away from home. What
a question to ask! Only look at all this."

A watery gleam of sunshine flashed from the west and went out between
two long lines of walls; and then the broken confusion of roofs, the

chimney-stacks, the gold letters sprawling over the fronts of houses,
the sombre polish of windows, stood resigned and sullen under the

falling gloom. The whole length of the street, deep as a well and
narrow like a corridor, was full of a sombre and ceaseless stir. Our

ears were filled by a headlongshuffle and beat of rapid footsteps and
by an underlying rumour--a rumour vast, faint, pulsating, as of

panting breaths, of beating hearts, of gasping voices. Innumerable
eyes stared straight in front, feet moved hurriedly, blank faces

flowed, arms swung. Over all, a narrow ragged strip of smoky sky wound
about between the high roofs, extended and motionless" target="_blank" title="a.静止的；固定的">motionless, like a soiled

streamer flying above the rout of a mob.
"Ye-e-e-s," said Jackson, meditatively.

The big wheels of hansoms turned slowly along the edge of side-walks;
a pale-faced youth strolled, overcome by weariness, by the side of his

stick and with the tails of his overcoat flapping gently near his
heels; horses stepped gingerly on the greasypavement, tossing their

heads; two young girls passed by, talking vivaciously and with shining
eyes; a fine old fellow strutted, red-faced, stroking a white

moustache; and a line of yellow boards with blue letters on them
approached us slowly, tossing on high behind one another like some

queer wreckage adrift upon a river of hats.
"Ye-e-es," repeated Jackson. His clear blue eyes looked about,

contemptuous, amused and hard, like the eyes of a boy. A clumsy string
of red, yellow, and green omnibuses rolled swaying, monstrous and

gaudy; two shabby children ran across the road; a knot of dirty men
with red neckerchiefs round their bare throats lurched along,

discussing filthily; a ragged old man with a face of despair yelled
horribly in the mud the name of a paper; while far off, amongst the

tossing heads of horses, the dull flash of harnesses, the jumble of
lustrous panels and roofs of carriages, we could see a policeman,

helmeted and dark, stretching out a rigid arm at the crossing of the
streets.

"Yes; I see it," said Jackson, slowly. "It is there; it pants, it
runs, it rolls; it is strong and alive; it would smash you if you

didn't look out; but I'll be hanged if it is yet as real to me as
. . . as the other thing . . . say, Karain's story."

I think that, decidedly, he had been too long away from home.
THE IDIOTS

We were driving along the road from Treguier to Kervanda. We passed at
a smart trot between the hedges topping an earth wall on each side of

the road; then at the foot of the steep ascent before Ploumar the
horse dropped into a walk, and the driver jumped down heavily from the

box. He flicked his whip and climbed the incline, stepping clumsily
uphill by the side of the carriage, one hand on the footboard, his

eyes on the ground. After a while he lifted his head, pointed up the
road with the end of the whip, and said--

"The idiot!"
The sun was shining violently upon the undulating surface of the land.

The rises were topped by clumps of meagre trees, with their branches
showing high on the sky as if they had been perched upon stilts. The

small fields, cut up by hedges and stone walls that zig-zagged over
the slopes, lay in rectangular patches of vivid greens and yellows,

resembling the unskilful daubs of a naive picture. And the landscape
was divided in two by the white streak of a road stretching in long

loops far away, like a river of dust crawling out of the hills on its
way to the sea.

"Here he is," said the driver, again.
In the long grass bordering the road a face glided past the carriage

at the level of the wheels as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face
was red, and the bullet head with close-cropped hair seemed to lie

alone, its chin in the dust. The body was lost in the bushes growing
thick along the bottom of the deep ditch.

It was a boy's face. He might have been sixteen, judging from the
size--perhaps less, perhaps more. Such creatures are forgotten by

time, and live untouched by years till death gathers them up into its
compassionate bosom; the faithful death that never forgets in the

press of work the most insignificant of its children.
"Ah! there's another," said the man, with a certain satisfaction in

his tone, as if he had caught sight of something expected.
There was another. That one stood nearly in the middle of the road in

the blaze of sunshine at the end of his own short shadow. And he stood
with hands pushed into the opposite sleeves of his long coat, his head

sunk between the shoulders, all hunched up in the flood of heat. From
a distance he had the aspect of one suffering from intense cold.

"Those are twins," explained the driver.
The idiot shuffled two paces out of the way and looked at us over his

shoulder when we brushed past him. The glance was unseeing and
staring, a fascinated glance; but he did not turn to look after us.

Probably the image passed before the eyes without leaving any trace on
the misshapen brain of the creature. When we had topped the ascent I

looked over the hood. He stood in the road just where we had left him.
The driver clambered into his seat, clicked his tongue, and we went

downhill. The brake squeaked horribly from time to time. At the foot
he eased off the noisy mechanism and said, turning half round on his