amily, fair education, and finally a clerk at L80 a
year. A pretty typewriter, marriage, and no help from his father.
First the girl wife was dismissed, and then the boy husband. The child
was born, and the mother died from lack of proper nourishment and
comfort. For a few years the father earned a few coppers by playing
before public-houses in the East End, and then took to the road.
Somehow or other he found himself on the Continent, and after many
years he had turned up here. It was all very vague and incoherent.
Often starving, homeless, and speaking no language but his own, is it
to be wondered that the man had lost count of days, years, and time?
Now he had a desire to journey to Greece, why, he knew not, but he
clung to it with all a weak man's obstinacy. We could never let him
trudge through Albania, and so the Scotchman procured him a free
passage to Corfu by steamer. He left us one morning, leading his son
by the hand, and over his shoulder a sack containing his worldly
possessions, a sorrowful, ludicrous, and pitiful picture.

Many weeks afterwards--P. and I had been on an expedition in the
meantime--we sat again in Petri's garden at just such a sunset. We
remembered the musician, and one of us jokingly remarked that his
music would not be so appreciated in Greece as by us music-starved
exiles. Then the Austrian told us the sequel. He had heard it from a
murderous Albanian friend of his, who sometimes brought him specimens.
The wanderer had not used his ticket, and had walked from Antivari to
Dulcigno, from thence he had attempted his original plan of crossing
Albania on foot. He knew nothing of geography or nationality, and
doubtless imagined that he could earn his way as in a civilised
country. On the way to Scutari a band of Albanians stopped him, and he
played to them. The instrument pleased them, and they took it from
him. Then they took the boy--though why they did so is not clear, for
they do not kidnap children--and the father, in a fit of wild despair,
sprang at the nearest Albanian. The Albanians are always glad of an
excuse to kill; the wanderer found his death in perhaps the only
moment of heroism that he had displayed throughout his wretched life.
Such, though, was the story our informant had gleaned, and it took the
edge off our evening's amusement.

But other evenings we were merry, and many were the wonderful stories
of adventure told over bottled beer and an extraordinary salad which
old Gu