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station at ten past eleven. He was gone. Tears gushed from
the eyes of the dissipated host. The seer raised his hand to
heaven, murmuring: The vendetta of Mananaun! The sage
repeated: Lex talionis. The sentimentalist is he who would
enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing
done. Malachias, overcome by emotion, ceased. The mys-
tery was unveiled. Haines was the third brother. His real
name was Childs. The black panther was himself the ghost
of his own father. He drank drugs to obliterate. For this
relief much thanks. The lonely house by the graveyard is
uninhabited. No soul will live there. The spider pitches her
web in the solitude. The nocturnal rat peers from his hole. A
curse is on it. It is haunted. Murderer’s ground.
What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue
of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach,
to be gay with the merry and mournful with the down-
cast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer
is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud
of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder
of a modest substance in the funds. A score of years are
blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a retrospec-
tive arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!),
he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, pre-
cociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the
old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his book-
satchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of
wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought. Or it is the same figure, a
year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!),
already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family