essness to form, from nothing to everything--this it is that I
find in either statue; and this it is in virtue of which the Balzac has
unbeknown a brother on the Italian seaboard.

Here stands--or rather struggles--on his pedestal this younger brother,
in strange contrast with the scenery about him. Mildly, behind his back,
the sea laps the shingle. Mildly, in front of him, on the other side
of the road, rise some of those mountains whereby the Earth, before she
settled down to cool, compassed--she, too--some sort of self-expression.
Mildly around his pedestal, among rusty anchors strewn there on the
grass between road and beach, sit the fishermen, mending their nets
or their sails, or whittling bits of wood. What will you say of these
fishermen when----but I outstrip my narrative.

I had no inkling of tragedy when first I came to the statue. I did not
even know it was a statue. I had made by night the short journey from
Genoa to this place beside the sea; and, driving along the coast-road
to the hotel that had been recommended, I passed what in the starlight
looked like nothing but an elderly woman mounted on a square pedestal
and gazing out seaward--a stout, elderly, lonely woman in a poke bonnet,
indescribable except by that old Victorian term 'a party,' and as unlike
Balzac's younger brother as only Sarah Gamp's elder sister could be.
How, I wondered in my hotel, came the elder sister of Sarah Gamp to be
here in Liguria and in the twentieth century? How clomb she, puffing and
panting, on to that pedestal? For what argosy of gin was she straining
her old eyes seaward? I knew there would be no sleep for me until I had
solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along the way I had come.
The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the starlight the 'party'
who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous, mysterious, there she stood,
immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the moon. By a slight shoreward
lift of crinoline, as against the seaward protrusion of poke bonnet, a
grotesque balance was given to the unshapely shape of her. For all her
uncanniness, I thought I had never seen any one, male or female, old
or young, look so hopelessly common. I felt that by daylight a noble
vulgarity might be hers. In the watches of the night she was hopelessly,
she was transcendently common.

Little by little, as I came nearer, she ceased to illude me, and I began
to think of her as 'it.' What 'it' was, however, I knew not until I
was at