He comes down in one or other of his parts every day: to-day it's the genial squire, yesterday it was the haw-haw officer of the Crimean school.

But a real live officer from the Front we don't happen to have had, much less a wounded one, and you limp straight into the breach." I should have resented these pleasantries from an ordinary stranger, but this libertine might be held to have earned his charter, and moreover I had further use for him.

We were loitering on the steps between the glass veranda and the terrace at the back of the hotel.

The little sunlit stage was full of vivid, trivial, transitory life, it seemed as a foil to the vast eternal scene.

The hanging judge still strutted with his cigar, peering jocosely from under the broad brim of his Panama; the great actor still posed aloof, the human Matterhorn of the group.