“Positively the sea itself looked like absinthe, green and bitter and poisonous.  I had never known it look so unfamiliar before.  In the sky was that early and stormy darkness that is so depressing to the mind, and the wind blew shrilly round the little lonely coloured kiosk where they sell the newspapers, and along the sand-hills by the shore.  There I saw a fishing-boat with a brown sail standing in silently from the sea.  It was already quite close, and out of it clambered a man of monstrous stature, who came wading to shore with the water not up to his knees, though it would have reached the hips of many men.  He leaned on a long rake or pole, which looked like a trident, and made him look like a Triton.  Wet as he was, and with strips of seaweed clinging to him, he walked across to my cafe, and, sitting down at a table outside, asked for cherry brandy, a liqueur which I keep, but is seldom demanded.  Then the monster, with great politeness, invited me to partake of a vermouth before my dinner, and we fell into conversation.  He had apparently crossed from Kent by a small boat got at a private bargain because of some odd fancy he had for passing promptly in an easterly direction, and not waiting for any of the official boats.  He was, he somewhat vaguely explained, looking for a house.  When I naturally asked him where the house was, he answered that he did not know; it was on an island; it was somewhere to the east; or, as he expressed it with a hazy and yet impatient gesture, `over there.’

“I asked him how, if he did not know the place, he would know it when he saw it.  Here he suddenly ceased to be hazy, and became alarmingly minute.  He gave a description of the house detailed enough for an auctioneer.  I have forgotten nearly all the details except the last two, which were that the lamp-post was painted green, and that there was a red pillar-box at the corner.

“`A red pillar-box!’ I cried in astonishment. `Why, the place must be in England!’

“`I had forgotten,’ he said, nodding heavily. `That is the island’s name.’

“`But, nom du nom,’ I cried testily, `you’ve just come from England, my boy.’

“`They said it was England,’ said my imbecile, conspiratorially. `They said it was Kent.  But Kentish men are such liars one can’t believe anything they say.’

“`Monsieur,’ I said, `you must pardon me.  I am elderly, and the fumisteries of the young men are beyond me.  I go by common sense, or, at the largest, by that extension of applied common sense called science.’

“`Science!’ cried the stranger. `There is only one good thing science ever discovered—­a good thing, good tidings of great joy—­ that the world is round.’

“I told him with civility that his words conveyed no impression to my intelligence. `I mean,’ he said, `that going right round the world is the shortest way to where you are already.’

“`Is it not even shorter,’ I asked, `to stop where you are?’