to find Macgregor on the door-step. "Why, you are all right" he said "What did the Bonne mean by telling me that you had hurt your arm and carried it in a sling."
Once when I met him in the street in his Highland clothes, with several knives in his stocking, he said "When I am dressed like this I feel like a walking flame" and I think that everything he did was but an attempt to feel like a walking flame. Yet at heart he was, I think, gentle, and perhaps even a little timid. He had some impediment in his nose that gave him a great deal of trouble, and it could have been removed had he not shrunk from the slight operation; and once when he was left in a mouse-infested flat with some live traps, he collected his captives into a large bird-cage, and to avoid the necessity of their drowning, fed them there for several weeks. Being a self-educated, unscholarly, learned man, he was bound to express the fundamental antithesis in the most crude form, and being arrogant, to prevent as far as possible that alternation between the two natures which 1s, it may be, necessary to sanity. When the nature turns to its spiritual opposite alone there can be no alternative, but what nature is pure enough for that.
I see Paris in the Eighteen-Nineties as a number of events separated from one another, and without cause or consequence, without lot or part in the logical structure of my life; I can often as little find their dates as I can those of events in my early childhood. William Sharp, who came to see me there may have come in 1895, or on some visit four or five years later, but certainly I was in an hotel in the Boulevard Raspail. When he stood up to go he said, "What is that" pointing to a geometrical form painted upon a little piece of cardboard that lay upon my window sill. And then before I could answer, looked out of the window saying "There is a funeral passing." I said "That is curious, as the Death symbol is painted upon the card." I did not look out of the window for I had no doubt the funeral was a dream. A few days later he came back and said "I have been very ill, you must never allow me to see that symbol again." He did not seem anxious to be questioned, but years later he said "I will now tell you what happened in Paris. I had two rooms at my hotel, a front sitting-room and a bedroom leading out of it. As I passed the threshold of the sitting-room, I saw a woman standing at the bureau writing, and presently she went into my bedroom. I thought, somebody has got into the wrong room by
