It seemed a little queer that our friend in the bowler hat should move and breathe within one short flight of a cuckoo from this home of Pan.  One could not but at first feelingly remember the old Boer saying:  “O God, what things man sees when he goes out without a gun!” But soon the infinite incongruity of this juxtaposition began to produce within one a curious eagerness, a sort of half-philosophical delight.  It began to seem too good, almost too romantic, to be true.  To think of the gramophone wedded to the thin sweet singing of the olive leaves in the evening wind; to remember the scent of his rank cigar marrying with this wild incense; to read that enchanted name, “Inn of Tranquillity,” and hear the bland and affable remark of the gentleman who owned it—­such were, indeed, phenomena to stimulate souls to speculation.  And all unconsciously one began to justify them by thoughts of the other incongruities of existence—­the strange, the passionate incongruities of youth and age, wealth and poverty, life and death; the wonderful odd bedfellows of this world; all those lurid contrasts which haunt a man’s spirit till sometimes he is ready to cry out:  “Rather than live where such things can be, let me die!”

Like a wild bird tracking through the air, one’s meditation wandered on, following that trail of thought, till the chance encounter became spiritually luminous.  That Italian gentleman of the world, with his bowler hat, his skittle-alley, his gramophone, who had planted himself down in this temple of wild harmony, was he not Progress itself—­the blind figure with the stomach full of new meats and the brain of raw notions?  Was he not the very embodiment of the wonderful child, Civilisation, so possessed by a new toy each day that she has no time to master its use—­naive creature lost amid her own discoveries!  Was he not the very symbol of that which was making economists thin, thinkers pale, artists haggard, statesmen bald—­the symbol of Indigestion Incarnate!  Did he not, delicious, gross, unconscious man, personify beneath his Americo-Italian polish all those rank and primitive instincts, whose satisfaction necessitated the million miseries of his fellows; all those thick rapacities which stir the hatred of the humane and thin-skinned!  And yet, one’s meditation could not stop there—­it was not convenient to the heart!

A little above us, among the olive-trees, two blue-clothed peasants, man and woman, were gathering the fruit—­from some such couple, no doubt, our friend in the bowler hat had sprung; more “virile” and adventurous than his brothers, he had not stayed in the home groves, but had gone forth to drink the waters of hustle and commerce, and come back—­what he was.  And he, in turn, would beget children, and having made his pile out of his ‘Anglo-American hotel’ would place those children beyond the coarser influences of life, till they became, perhaps, even as our selves, the salt of the earth, and despised him.  And