t old inns, which the march of what
we are pleased to call 'progress' is steadily crowding off the face of
the land, are always deeply interesting to me; I love them. What a day!
What a picture! What a sky! As blue as what Dollops calls the 'Merry
Geranium Sea.' I'd give a Jew's eye for a handful of those apple
blossoms, they are divine!"

Narkom hastened from the room without replying. The strain of poetry
underlying the character of this strange, inscrutable man, his amazing
love of Nature, his moments of almost womanish weakness and sentiment,
astonished and mystified him. It was as if a hawk had acquired the
utterly useless trick of fluting like a nightingale, and being himself
wholly without imagination, he could not comprehend it in the smallest
degree.

When he returned a few minutes later, however, the idealist seemed to
have simmered down into the materialist, the extraordinary to have
become merged in the ordinary, for he found his famous ally no longer
studying the beauties of Nature, but giving his whole attention to the
sordid commonplaces of man. He was standing before a glaringly printed
bill, one of many that were tacked upon the walls, which set forth in
amazing pictures and double-leaded type the wonders that were to be seen
daily and nightly at Olympia, where, for a month past, "Van Zant's Royal
Belgian Circus and World-famed Menagerie" had been holding forth to
"Crowded and delighted audiences." Much was made of two "star turns"
upon this lurid bill: "Mademoiselle Marie de Zanoni, the beautiful and
peerless bare-back equestrienne, the most daring lady rider in the
universe," for the one; and, for the other, "Chevalier Adrian di Roma,
king of the animal world, with his great aggregation of savage and
ferocious wild beasts, including the famous man-eating African lion,
Nero, the largest and most ferocious animal of its species in
captivity." And under this latter announcement there was a picture of a
young and handsome man, literally smothered with medals, lying at full
length, with his arms crossed and his head in the wide-open jaws of a
snarling, wild-eyed lion.

"My dear chap, you really do make me believe that there actually is
such a thing as instinct," said Narkom, as he came in. "Fancy your
selecting that particular bill out of all the others in the room! What
an abnormal individual you are!"

"Why? Has it anything to do with the case you have in hand?"

"Anything to do with it? My dear fe