they are placed in well-chosen positions; they give no offence to
the eye."

"What do we know of the beauty they replace? They are a mere rash.
Why should we men play the part of bacteria upon the face of our
Mother?"

"All life is that!"

"No! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle creatures that
live their wild shy lives in forest and jungle. That is a part of
her. That is the natural bloom of her complexion. But these houses
and tramways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from her
veins----! You can't better my image of the rash. It's a morbid
breaking out! I'd give it all for one--what is it?--free and natural
chamois."

"You live at times in a house?" I asked.

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature was the best, he
said, and, with a glance at his feet, the most beautiful. He
professed himself a Nazarite, and shook back his Teutonic poet's
shock of hair. So he came to himself, and for the rest of our walk
he kept to himself as the thread of his discourse, and went over
himself from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under the sun
by way of illustrating his splendours. But especially his foil was
the relative folly, the unnaturalness and want of logic in his
fellow men. He held strong views about the extreme simplicity of
everything, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had
confounded it all. "Hence, for example, these trams! They are always