ntense worshipper, sees; and this unaesthetic
Mrs. Smith, altogether unsatisfactory to the artistic eye, most
practical, most commonplace, carries within her some of the Promethean
flame, and is worthy of that halo of homely joy and affection with
which she is crowned.

No. XXXV

SAHIB

[February 19, 1880.]

I first met him driving home from cutcherry in his buggy. He was a fat
man in the early afternoon of life. In his blue eyes lay the mystery
of many a secret salad and unwritten milk-punch; but though he smoked
the longest cheroots of Trichinopoly and Dindigul, his hand was still
steady and still grasped a cue or a long tumbler, with the unerring
certainty of early youth and unshaken health.

Of an evening he would come over to my bungalow in a friendly way; he
would "just drop in," as he used to say, in his pleasant offhand
fashion, and he would irrigate himself with my brandy and soda, amid
genial smiles and a brandishing of his long cheroot, playfully
indicating his recognition of a stimulant with which he had been long
acquainted.

As he began to glow with conversation and brandy, he would call for
cards and play ecarte with me, until the room gradually resolved
itself into one of the circles of some Californian Inferno, with a
knave of spades digging the diamonds out of my heart and clubbing my
trumps.

He would leave me throbbing with the eructation of oaths and the
hollow aching of an empty purse, and uncertain whether to give up
cards and liquor for hymns and Government paper or whether to call him
back and take fortune by storm. But he had gone off with a resolute
"good night" that tended to dispel illusions; he had gone to his own
No. 1 Exshaw and his French novels, which he read as he lay on his
solitary bachelor couch.

Yes,--his bachelor couch, for he was not married. He had loved much
and often. He had loved a great many people in different stations of
life, but they did not marry him. He was, upon the whole, glad that
they did not marry him; for they were often married to other people,
and he would have been lonely with one, dissatisfied with two, and
embarrassed with more; so he continued his austere bachelor life; and
always tried to love unostentatiously somebody else's wife.

He loved somebody else's wife, because he had no wife of his own, and
the heart requires love. It was very wrong of him to love somebody
else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged t