United States in the seventies, and had a
word or two for my shoulders.

"Be careful how you talk too much," old Welstoke would say. "It's a very
fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and
keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you
do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or
music. One way to be educated is to be silent!"

Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of "finish," as she called
it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word
or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.

In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the
Grand Canal, called "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for
dinner, we could find the cafe well-nigh empty. The truth was I went
there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no
wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes
from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a
misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.

Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what
happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then
been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has
followed us like a skulk o' night.

The cafe was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white
walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the
corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too
early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that
the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table
and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head,
which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of
Wight and my mother's song and the colored crayon of my father, looking
very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel.

I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of
crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet.

"So here is where they boast of excitement?" roared a thick voice. "And
yet a man must make it himself."

The waiters had surrounded him, whoever he was, and I could not see him
then.

"Bah!" he cried, beginning to laugh like a stevedore. "I'm an American.
Monte Carlo and all that! I'll pay, you frog-catchers! Take that! Ask
th