nlightening reply, "Quite right;
quite right. Very good. Excellent!" Which appeared to Inglewood,
on reflection, rather the speech of a new-born babe accepting
a name than of a grown-up man admitting one.

Despite these doubts about identity, the hapless Inglewood
watched the other unpack, and stood about his bedroom in all
the impotent attitudes of the male friend. Mr. Smith unpacked
with the same kind of whirling accuracy with which he climbed
a tree--throwing things out of his bag as if they were rubbish,
yet managing to distribute quite a regular pattern all round
him on the floor.

As he did so he continued to talk in the same somewhat gasping manner
(he had come upstairs four steps at a time, but even without this his style
of speech was breathless and fragmentary), and his remarks were still
a string of more or less significant but often separate pictures.

"Like the day of judgement," he said, throwing a bottle
so that it somehow settled, rocking on its right end.
"People say vast universe... infinity and astronomy;
not sure... I think things are too close together... packed up;
for travelling... stars too close, really... why, the sun's
a star, too close to be seen properly; the earth's a star,
too close to be seen at all... too many pebbles on the beach;
ought all to be put in rings; too many blades of grass to study...
feathers on a bird make the brain reel; wait till the big bag
is unpacked... may all be put in our right places then."

Here he stopped, literally for breath--throwing a shirt to the other end
of the room, and then a bottle of ink so that it fell quite neatly beyond it.
Inglewood looked round on this strange, half-symmetrical disorder with
an increasing doubt.

In fact, the more one explored Mr. Smith's holiday luggage,
the less one could make anything of it. One peculiarity of it
was that almost everything seemed to be there for the wrong reason;
what is secondary with every one else was primary with him.
He would wrap up a pot or pan in brown paper; and the unthinking
assistant would discover that the pot was valueless or even unnecessary,
and that it was the brown paper that was truly precious.
He produced two or three boxes of cigars, and explained
with plain and perplexing sincerity that he was no smoker,
but that cigar-box wood was by far the best for fretwork.
He also exhibited about six small bottles of wine, white and red,
and Inglewood, happening to note a Volnay which he