all happened a great while ago, when--of such flimsy stuff is glory
woven,--Emilio Aguinaldo and Captain Coghlan were the persons most
talked of in America; and when the Mazet committee was "investigating"
I forget what, but with column after column about it in the papers
every day; and when _Me und Gott_ was a famous poem, and "to
hobsonize" was the most popular verb; and when I was twenty-one. _Sic
transit gloria mundi_, as it says in the back of the dictionary.




4.

_He Talks with Charteris_


It was upon the evening of this day, after Mr. and Mrs. Blagden had
been duly rice-pelted and entrained, that I first talked against John
Charteris. The novelist was, as has been said, a cousin of Peter
Blagden, and as such, was one of the wedding guests at Bellemeade; and
that evening, well toward midnight, the little man, midway in the
consumption of one of his interminable cigarettes, happened to come
upon me seated upon the terrace and gazing, rather vacantly, in the
direction of the moon.

I was not thinking of anything in particular; only there was a by-end
of verse which sang itself over and over again, somewhere in the back
of my brain--"Her eyes were the eyes of a bride whom delight makes
afraid, her eyes were the eyes of a bride"--and so on, all over again,
as at night a traveller may hear his train jogging through a