ay in the Puerta del Sol, that swarming central
parallelogram of Madrid, and musing on the possibilities of progress in
a nation which contents itself with ox-transport in the heart of its
capital, when a carriage drove past me in which I can almost still swear
I saw Joanna. It entered the Calle de San Hieronimo. I started in racing
pursuit and fell into the arms of a green-gloved soldier. To avoid
arrest as a madman or a murderer, for no sane man runs in Spain, I
leaped into a fiacre and gave such chase as tomorrow's victim of the
bull-ring would allow. We came up with the carriage on the Prado, just
in time to see the skirts of a lady vanish through the door of a house.
I dismissed my cab and waited. I waited two solid hours. That attracted
no attention. Everyone waits in Spain. To stand interminably at a
street corner is to take out a patent of respectability. But my
confounded heart beat wildly. I had an _agonized desire_ to see her
again. I addressed the liveried coachman in my best Spanish, taking off
my hat and bowing low.

"'Senor, will you have the great goodness to tell me who is that lady?'

"'Senor,' he replied with equal urbanity, 'it is not correct for
coachmen to give rapscallions information as to their employers.'

"'When your Senora bids the rapscallion sit beside her in the carriage
and orders you to drive, you will regret your insolence,' said I.

"I turned a haughty back on him; but I felt his lackey's eye fixed
disapprovingly on my rags.

"'I will hear the sound,' said I to myself, 'of her silvery English
voice, or I will die.'

"Then the door opened, and the beautiful lady entered the carriage; _and
it was not Joanna_.

"The gods were without bowels of compassion for me that day."

Another scrap contains the following:

"Thus have I come to the end of a five years' vagabondage. I started out
as a Pilgrim to the Inner Shrine of Truth which I have sought from St.
Petersburg to Lisbon, from Taormina to Christiania. I have lived in a
spiritual shadowland, dreaming elusive dreams, my better part stayed by
the fitful vision of things unseen. Such an exquisite wild-goose-chase
has never man undertaken before or since the dear Knight of La Mancha.
And now I come to think of it, I don't know what the deuce I have been
after, save that instead of pursuing I have all the time been running
away.

"In my next quest I must not proclaim my Dulcinea too loudly. When
Hedwige's little sister came to me