y pronounced: "fat legs, thin legs,
and legs." They witnessed a knuckle-fight in Whitechapel between a
sailorman and a Jewish pugilist. The referee was a member of a famous
sporting club, and the purse was put up by a young peer on leave from
the bloody shambles before Ypres. "Our trans-Tiber evenings," Paul
termed these adventures.

He had seized upon a clue to the ills of the world and he pursued it
feverishly. "If men realised, as they realise that physical illness
follows physical excess, that for every moment of pain unnecessarily
inflicted upon any living creature--a horse, a dog, a cage-bird--they
must suffer themselves a worse pang, would not the world be a better
place?" he asked. "That fighting peer is accounted a fine fellow by his
companions, and in an earlier life, when the unshaped destinies of men
were being rough-hewn with sword and axe, he _was_ a fine fellow. But
that earlier influence now is checking his development. If he could
realise that he will probably be reborn a weakling doomed to suffer the
buffets of the physically strong, he would doubtless reconsider his
philosophy. He has lost track of himself. Our childish love of animals,
which corresponds to a psychic pre-natal phase, is a memory which
becomes obscured as the fleshly veil grows denser--which the many
neglect, but which the wise man cherishes."

"Heredity plays its part, too," said Thessaly.

"Quite so. It is difficult, sometimes almost impossible, to distinguish
between the influences of heredity and those of pre-existence."

"More especially since few of us know our own fathers, and none of us
our grandfathers. If our family tree record a line of abstemious
forbears, and we mysteriously develop a partiality for neat rum and
loose company, we hesitate whether to reproach ourselves for the vices
of a previous existence or to disparage the morality of our
grandmother."

Strange stories won currency at this time, too. Arising as he had done
out of a cataclysm, Paul Mario by many was accepted as the harbinger of
a second Coming. His claims were based upon no mere reiteration of
ancient theories, but upon a comprehensible system which required no
prayer-won faith from its followers, but which logically explained life,
death, and those parts of the Word of Jesus Christ which orthodoxy
persisted in regarding as "divine mysteries." Paul's concept of God and
the Creation was substantially identical with that of Jacob Boehme and
the Hermet