wandered, in the glaring sunshine of that endless afternoon. I remember
the sound of carpenters' hammers all along Piccadilly and the bare
chaotic look of the half-erected "stands." Was it in the Green Park or in
Kensington Gardens or WHERE was it that I sat on a chair beneath
a tree, trying to read an evening paper? There was a phrase in the leading
article that went on repeating itself in my fagged mind: "Little is hidden
from this August Lady full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of
Sovereignty." I remember wildly conceiving a letter (to reach Windsor
by an express messenger told to await answer): "Madam: Well knowing
that your Majesty is full of the garnered wisdom of sixty years of
Sovereignty, I venture to ask your advice in the following delicate matter.
Mr. Enoch Soames, whose poems you may or may not know--" Was
there NO way of helping him, saving him? A bargain was a
bargain, and I was the last man to aid or abet any one in wriggling out of
a reasonable obligation. I wouldn't have lifted a little finger to save
Faust. But poor Soames! Doomed to pay without respite
an eternal price for nothing but a fruitless search and a bitter
disillusioning.

Odd and uncanny it seemed to me that he, Soames, in the flesh, in
the waterproof cape, was at this moment living in the last decade of the
next century, poring over books not yet written, and seeing and seen by
men not yet born. Uncannier and odder still that to-night and evermore
he would be in hell. Assuredly, truth was stranger than fiction.

Endless that afternoon was. Almost I wished I had gone with
Soames, not, indeed, to stay in the reading-room, but to sally forth for a
brisk sight-seeing walk around a new London. I wandered restlessly out
of the park I had sat in. Vainly I tried to imagine myself an ardent tourist
from the eighteenth century. Intolerable was the strain of the