s blind; he does not see God. God is blind; the day that he created the
world He did not see the devil manage to creep into it. I myself am
blind; I speak, and do not see that you are deaf. This blind girl who
accompanies us is a mysterious priestess. Vesta has confided to her her
torch. She has in her character depths as soft as a division in the wool
of a sheep. I believe her to be a king's daughter, though I do not
assert it as a fact. A laudable distrust is the attribute of wisdom. For
my own part, I reason and I doctor, I think and I heal. _Chirurgus sum_.
I cure fevers, miasmas, and plagues. Almost all our melancholy and
sufferings are issues, which if carefully treated relieve us quietly
from other evils which might be worse. All the same I do not recommend
you to have an anthrax, otherwise called carbuncle. It is a stupid
malady, and serves no good end. One dies of it--that is all. I am
neither uncultivated nor rustic. I honour eloquence and poetry, and live
in an innocent union with these goddesses. I conclude by a piece of
advice. Ladies and gentlemen, on the sunny side of your dispositions,
cultivate virtue, modesty, honesty, probity, justice, and love. Each one
here below may thus have his little pot of flowers on his window-sill.
My lords and gentlemen, I have spoken. The play is about to begin."

The man who was apparently a sailor, and who had been listening outside,
entered the lower room of the inn, crossed it, paid the necessary
entrance money, reached the courtyard which was full of people, saw at
the bottom of it a caravan on wheels, wide open, and on the platform an
old man dressed in a bearskin, a young man looking like a mask, a blind
girl, and a wolf.

"Gracious heaven!" he cried, "what delightful people!"

CHAPTER III.

WHERE THE PASSER-BY REAPPEARS.

The Green Box, as we have just seen, had arrived in London. It was
established at Southwark. Ursus had been tempted by the bowling-green,
which had one great recommendation, that it was always fair-day there,
even in winter.

The dome of St. Paul's was a delight to Ursus.

London, take it all in all, has some good in it. It was a brave thing to
dedicate a cathedral to St. Paul. The real cathedral saint is St. Peter.
St. Paul is suspected of imagination, and in matters ecclesiastical
imagination means heresy. St. Paul is a saint only with extenuating
circumstances. He entered heaven only by the artists' door.

A cathedral is a sign.