air. As we sat there came into view an apparition unmistakeable
from afar as an immemorial vagrant--the disowned, in his own rich
way, of all the English ages. As he approached us he slackened
pace and finally halted, touching his cap. He was a man of middle
age, clad in a greasy bonnet with false-looking ear-locks
depending from its sides. Round his neck was a grimy red scarf,
tucked into his waistcoat; his coat and trousers had a remote
affinity with those of a reduced hostler. In one hand he had a
stick; on his arm he bore a tattered basket, with a handful of
withered vegetables at the bottom. His face was pale haggard and
degraded beyond description--as base as a counterfeit coin, yet
as modelled somehow as a tragic mask. He too, like everything
else, had a history. From what height had he fallen, from what
depth had he risen? He was the perfect symbol of generated
constituted baseness; and I felt before him in presence of a
great artist or actor.

"For God's sake, gentlemen," he said in the raucous tone of
weather-beaten poverty, the tone of chronic sore-throat
exacerbated by perpetual gin, "for God's sake, gentlemen, have
pity on a poor fern-collector!"--turning up his stale daisies.
"Food hasn't passed my lips, gentlemen, for the last three days."
We gaped at him and at each other, and to our imagination his
appeal had almost the force of a command. "I wonder if half-a-
crown would help?" I privately wailed. And our fasting botanist
went limping away through the park with the grace of controlled
stupefaction still further enriching his outline.

"I feel as if I had seen my Doppelganger" said Searle. "He
reminds me of myself. What am I but a mere figure in the