It seemed a little queer that our friend in the bowler hat should move
and breathe within one short flight of a cuckoo from this home of Pan.
One could not but at first feelingly remember the old Boer saying: "O
God, what things man sees when he goes out without a gun!" But soon the
infinite incongruity of this juxtaposition began to produce within one a
curious eagerness, a sort of half-philosophical delight. It began to seem
too good, almost too romantic, to be true. To think of the gramophone
wedded to the thin sweet singing of the olive leaves in the evening wind;
to remember the scent of his rank cigar marrying with this wild incense;
to read that enchanted name, "Inn of Tranquillity," and hear the bland
and affable remark of the gentleman who owned it--such were, indeed,
phenomena to stimulate souls to speculation. And all unconsciously one
began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of
existence--the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age,
wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this
world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man's spirit till
sometimes he is ready to cry out: "Rather than live where such things can
be, let me die!"

Like a wild bird tracking through the air, one's meditation wandered on,
following that trail of thought, till the chance encounter became
spiritually luminous. That Italian gentleman of the world, with his
bowler hat, his skittle-alley, his gramophone, who had planted himself
down in this temple of wild harmony, was he not Progress itself--the
blind figure with the stomach full of new meats and the brain of raw
notions? Was he not the very embodiment of the wonderful child,
Civilisation, so possessed by a new toy each day that she has no time to
master its use--naive creature lost amid her own discoveries! Was he not
the very symbol of that which was making economists thin, thinkers pale,
artists haggard, statesmen bald--the symbol of Indigestion Incarnate!