for me until I had solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along
the way I had come. The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the
starlight the `party' who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous,
mysterious, there she stood, immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the
moon. By a slight shoreward lift of crinoline, as against the seaward
protrusion of poke bonnet, a grotesque balance was given to the
unshapely shape of her. For all her uncanniness, I thought I had never
seen any one, male or female, old or young, look so hopelessly common.
I felt that by daylight a noble vulgarity might be hers. In the
watches of the night she was hopelessly, she was transcendently
common.

Little by little, as I came nearer, she ceased to illude me, and I
began to think of her as `it.' What `it' was, however, I knew not
until I was at quite close quarters to the pedestal it rose from.
There, on the polished granite, was carved this legend:

A UMBERTO Iø

And instinctively, as my eye travelled up, my hand leapt to the
salute; for I stood before the veiled image of a dead king, and had
been guilty of a misconception that dishonoured him.

Standing respectfully at one angle and another, I was able to form, by
the outlines of the grey sheeting that enveloped him, some rough
notion of his posture and his costume. Round what was evidently his
neck the sheeting was constricted by ropes; and the height and girth
of the bundle above--to half-closed eyes, even now, an averted poke-
bonnet--gave token of a tall helmet with a luxuriant shock of plumes
waving out behind. Immediately beneath the ropes, the breadth and