gement
came from me. The others were as irritated by his dabbling in magic as
most of us had been in Rome by Forepaugh's theosophic adventures. But he
amused me; he did not deal in the prose of his brand of magic, the
Black, of which so much was beginning to be heard, and still more was to
be heard, in Paris. He was all innuendo and strange hints and whispered
secrets, and I-could-if-I-woulds. One of my recent winters had been
devoted, not to dabbling in magic, for which I have not the temperament,
but to reading the literature of magic or of all things psychical, and I
could then, though I could not now, have passed a fairly good
examination in the modern authorities, from Madame Blavatsky to Louis
Jacolliot. Therefore I proved a sympathetic listener and heard, for my
pains, of the revival of old religions, and above all of old rites, and
of his dignity as high-priest, a figure of mystery and command moving
here and there among shadowy disciples in shadowy sanctuaries. For one
sunk such fathoms deep in mystery he was surprisingly concerned for the
outward sign. Like Huysmans's hero, he believed in the significance of
the material background, entertaining me with a detailed description of
his apartment in Paris, and I have not yet lost the vision he permitted
me of a bedroom hung and painted with scarlet, and of himself enshrined
in it, magnificent in scarlet silk pajamas. Probably it was to deceive
the world that he carried a tiny paint-box. I never saw him open it.

But most constant of our little party was Jobbins, our one Englishman,
who came in late to the _Orientale_--where, or if, he dined none of us
could say--with the stool and canvas and paint-box he had been carrying
about all day from one _campo_, or _calle_, or _canale_, to another, in
search of a subject. Jobbins's trouble was that he had passed too
brilliantly through South Kensington to do the teaching for which he was
trained, or to be willing to do anything but paint great pictures the
subjects for which he could never find; his mistake was to want to paint
them in Venice where there is nothing to paint that has not been painted
hundreds, or thousands, or millions of times before; and his misfortune
was not to seek in adversity the comfort and hope which the philosopher
believes to be its reward. He had become, as a consequence, the weariest
man who breathed. It made me tired to look at him. Later, he was forced
to abandon his high ambition and he accep