.

Already their wild steeds are pawing the ground with impatience; already the ill-omened riders have come together and are exchanging the last words before leaping into the saddle." "What horsemen are these ?" asked Argensola.
"Those which go before the Beast." The two friends thought this reply as unintelligible as the preceding words.

Desnoyers again said mentally, "He is drunk," but his curiosity forced him to ask, "What beast is that ?" "That of the Apocalypse." There was a brief silence, but the Russian's terseness of speech did not last long.

He felt the necessity of expressing his enthusiasm for the dreamer on the island rock of Patmos.

The poet of great and mystic vision was exerting, across two thousand years, his influence over this mysterious revolutionary, tucked away on the top floor of a house in Paris.