Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his respect for established powers, probably contributed in no small degree to make the magistrates tolerate his vagabond life and his low alliance with a wolf.  Sometimes of an evening, through the weakness of friendship, he allowed Homo to stretch his limbs and wander at liberty about the caravan.  The wolf was incapable of an abuse of confidence, and behaved in society, that is to say among men, with the discretion of a poodle.  All the same, if bad-tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties might have arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf chained up as much as possible.

From a political point of view, his writing about gold, not very intelligible in itself, and now become undecipherable, was but a smear, and gave no handle to the enemy.  Even after the time of James II., and under the “respectable” reign of William and Mary, his caravan might have been seen peacefully going its rounds of the little English country towns.  He travelled freely from one end of Great Britain to the other, selling his philtres and phials, and sustaining, with the assistance of his wolf, his quack mummeries; and he passed with ease through the meshes of the nets which the police at that period had spread all over England in order to sift wandering gangs, and especially to stop the progress of the Comprachicos.

This was right enough.  Ursus belonged to no gang.  Ursus lived with Ursus, a tete-a-tete, into which the wolf gently thrust his nose.  If Ursus could have had his way, he would have been a Caribbee; that being impossible, he preferred to be alone.  The solitary man is a modified savage, accepted by civilization.  He who wanders most is most alone; hence his continual change of place.  To remain anywhere long suffocated him with the sense of being tamed.  He passed his life in passing on his way.  The sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets, thorns, and holes in the rock.  His home was the forest.  He did not feel himself much out of his element in the murmur of crowded streets, which is like enough to the bluster of trees.  The crowd to some extent satisfies our taste for the desert.  What he disliked in his van was its having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house.  He would have realized his ideal, had he been able to put a cave on four wheels and travel in a den.

He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used to laugh; sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter laugh.  There is consent in a smile, while a laugh is often a refusal.

His great business was to hate the human race.  He was implacable in that hate.  Having made it clear that human life is a dreadful thing; having observed the superposition of evils, kings on the people, war on kings, the plague on war, famine on the plague, folly on everything; having proved a certain measure of chastisement in the mere fact of existence; having recognized that, death is a deliverance—­when