"Famous, eh?" I said, looking after the pursy figure of the miller in
his floury canvas round-about and corduroy trowsers, trotting up and
down among the bags.

"That is one of the Balacchi Brothers," Phil answered as we walked on.
"You've heard of them when you were a boy?"

I had heard of them. The great acrobats were as noted in their line of
art as Ellsler and Jenny Lind in theirs. But acrobats and danseuses had
been alike brilliant, wicked impossibilities to my youth, for I had been
reared a Covenanter of the Covenanters. In spite of the doubting
philosophies with which I had clothed myself at college, that old
Presbyterian training clung to me in everyday life close as my skin.

After that day I loitered about the mill, watching this man, whose life
had been spent in one godless theatre after another, very much as the
Florentine peasants looked after Dante when they knew he had come back
from hell. I was on the lookout for the taint, the abnormal signs, of
vice. It was about that time that I was fevered with the missionary
enthusiasm, and in Polynesia, where I meant to go (but where I never did
go), I declared to Phil daily that I should find in every cannibal the
half-effaced image of God, only waiting to be quickened into grace and
virtue. That was quite conceivable. But that a flashy, God-defying actor
could be the same man at heart as this fat, good-tempered, gossiping
miller, who jogged to the butcher's every morning for his wife, a basket
on one arm and a baby on the other, was not conceivable. He was a close
dealer at the butcher's, too, though dribbling gossip there as
everywhere; a regular attendant at St. Mark's, with his sandy-headed
flock about him, among whom he slept comfortably enough, it is true, but
with as pious dispositions as the rest of us.