in delicate wisps of smoke by the persistent South wind.  The clergy now began to appear in goodly numbers upon the scene.  They were in the best of humours and more ready than usual, it seemed, to take part in any conversation which might be going on.  It had been decided, during their informal gathering, that the apprehensions of the faithful could not be better allayed at this preliminary stage than by a mild demonstration of this kind.  Appearances were everything; so they had concluded, not for the first time.  And it was precisely then that the simple-minded parroco, surrounded by a knot of devout believers, pointed to the playful cloudlets of smoke as they issued from the mouth of the crater and apposite, but calculated to calm the minds of his hearers.  He said that no rosy schoolboy, smoking his first cigarette, ever looked more innocent.  An ominous, fateful speech!  Yet such was his holy simplicity that he failed to realize its import.  He failed to perceive how inauspicious the metaphor had been till Don Francesco, in a whisper, pointed out that appearances are apt to be deceptive and, alluding to certain experiences of his own at the tender age of six years, affirmed that the smoking of a first cigarette, for all its seeming harmlessness, is liable to be followed by something in the nature of a cataclysm.

There was worse to come.  For while the sun yet lingered on the horizon news of further portents came thick and fast.  A plum tree belonging to a farmer of good standing had unaccountably lost all its leaves.  The Duchess arrived in a state of unusual trepidation, declaring that the tortoise-shell of her lorgnette gave forth a crackling sound.  She appealed to Don Francesco to explain the meaning of this extraordinary circumstance; it crackled most distinctly, she declared.  Not far from the little bay where only yesterday the streamlet of Saint Elias still trickled into the sea, a fisherman had caught a one-eyed lamprey—­a beast, unquestionably, of ill repute.  The bibliographer, strolling about with Denis, recollected that his fox-terrier that very morning had been violently sick.  He seemed to attach no great importance to the affair; all the same, he said, it was rather queer; dogs are not like that; now, if it had been Keith. . . .  The baby of the principal grocer had tumbled downstairs and thereupon proceeded to swallow eight of its elder brother’s marbles which had been carelessly left on the floor—­without experiencing, so far as could be ascertained, any appreciable injury.  A mysterious disease, known as the scabies, had broken out among the Russian apostles.  The yacht of the American millionaire, Mr. van Koppen, arrived that day; there was nothing startling in this since he visited the island year after year at the same season; but why should she collide with a fishing-boat at the moment of anchoring?