volume of strange Icelandic legends, which I ardently desired to see
translated into French. He loved the supernatural, the dismal and
grewsome, but he spoke of the most marvellous things with a calmness that
was typically English, to which his gentle and quiet voice gave a
semblance of reality that was maddening.

Full of a haughty disdain for the world, with its conventions, prejudices
and code of morality, he had nailed to his house a name that was boldly
impudent. The keeper of a lonely inn who should write on his door:
"Travellers murdered here!" could not make a more sinister jest. I never
had entered his dwelling, when one day I received an invitation to
luncheon, following an accident that had occurred to one of his friends,
who had been almost drowned and whom I had attempted to rescue.

Although I was unable to reach the man until he had already been rescued,
I received the hearty thanks of the two Englishmen, and the following day
I called upon them.

The friend was a man about thirty years old. He bore an enormous head on
a child's body--a body without chest or shoulders. An immense
forehead, which seemed to have engulfed the rest of the man, expanded
like a dome above a thin face which ended in a little pointed beard. Two
sharp eyes and a peculiar mouth gave one the impression of the head of a
reptile, while the magnificent brow suggested a genius.

A nervous twitching shook this peculiar being, who walked, moved, acted
by jerks like a broken spring.

This was Algernon Charles Swinburne, son of an English admiral and
grandson, on the maternal side, of the Earl of Ashburnham.