hat, beyond some
local rumours that Smith had embarked on the south-eastern coast,
nothing was known of him again.

This impression was somewhat curiously clinched by Michael Moon in the few
but clear phrases in which he opened the defence upon the third charge.
So far from denying that Smith had fled from Croydon and disappeared on
the Continent, he seemed prepared to prove all this on his own account.
"I hope you are not so insular," he said, "that you will not respect
the word of a French innkeeper as much as that of an English gardener.
By Mr. Inglewood's favour we will hear the French innkeeper."

Before the company had decided the delicate point Inglewood was already
reading the account in question. It was in French. It seemed to them
to run something like this:--

"Sir,--Yes; I am Durobin of Durobin's Cafe on the sea-front at Gras,
rather north of Dunquerque. I am willing to write all I know
of the stranger out of the sea.

"I have no sympathy with eccentrics or poets. A man of sense
looks for beauty in things deliberately intended to be beautiful,
such as a trim flower-bed or an ivory statuette. One does not permit
beauty to pervade one's whole life, just as one does not pave
all the roads with ivory or cover all the fields with geraniums.
My faith, but we should miss the onions!

"But whether I read things backwards through my memory, or whether there
are indeed atmospheres of psychology which the eye of science cannot
as yet pierce, it is the humiliating fact that on that particular evening
I felt like a poet--like any little rascal of a poet who drinks absinthe
in the mad Montmartre.

"Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter
and poisonous. I had never known it look so unfamiliar before.
In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to
the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk
where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore.
There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from
the sea. It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man
of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up
to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.
He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him
look like a Triton. Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging
to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at