hey put me in prison like a criminal. They
took her. Oh, misery!"

Here the manuscript stopped. And as I suddenly raised my astonished eyes
to the doctor a terrific cry, a howl of impotent rage and of exasperated
longing resounded through the asylum.

"Listen," said the doctor. "We have to douse the obscene madman with
water five times a day. Sergeant Bertrand was the only one who was in
love with the dead."

Filled with astonishment, horror and pity, I stammered out:

"But--that tress--did it really exist?"

The doctor rose, opened a cabinet full of phials and instruments and
tossed over a long tress of fair hair which flew toward me like a golden
bird.

I shivered at feeling its soft, light touch on my hands. And I sat
there, my heart beating with disgust and desire, disgust as at the
contact of anything accessory to a crime and desire as at the temptation
of some infamous and mysterious thing.

The doctor said as he shrugged his shoulders:

"The mind of man is capable of anything."

ON THE RIVER

I rented a little country house last summer on the banks of the Seine,
several leagues from Paris, and went out there to sleep every evening.
After a few days I made the acquaintance of one of my neighbors, a man
between thirty and forty, who certainly was the most curious specimen
I ever met. He was an old boating man, and crazy about boating. He was
always beside the water, on the water, or in the water. He must have
been born in a boat, and he will certainly die in a boat at the last.

One evening as we were walking along the banks of the Seine I asked him
to tell me some stories about his life on the water. The good man at
once became animated, his whole expression changed, he became eloquent,
almost poetical. There was in his heart one great passion, an absorbing,
irresistible passion-the river.

Ah, he said to me, how many memories I have, connected with that river
that you see flowing beside us! You people who live in streets know
nothing about the river. But listen to a fisherman as he mentions the
word. To him it is a mysterious thing, profound, unknown, a land of
mirages and phantasmagoria, where one sees by night things that do
not exist, hears sounds that one does not recognize, trembles without
knowing why, as in passing through a cemetery--and it is, in fact, the
most sinister of cemeteries, one in which one has no tomb.

The land seems limited to the river boatman, and on dark nights, whe