n slipping through fog and mist across the
greasy pavement had offended his fresh New World conception of a more
tenderly nurtured sex, until his susceptibilities seemed to have grown
as callous and hardened as the flesh he looked upon, and he had begun to
regard them from the easy local standpoint of a distinct and differently
equipped class.

It chanced, also, that this afternoon some of the male workers had added
to their usual solidity a singular trance-like intoxication. It had
often struck him before as a form of drunkenness peculiar to the St.
Kentigern laborers. Men passed him singly and silently, as if following
some vague alcoholic dream, or moving through some Scotch mist of
whiskey and water. Others clung unsteadily but as silently together,
with no trace of convivial fellowship or hilarity in their dull fixed
features and mechanically moving limbs. There was something weird in
this mirthless companionship, and the appalling loneliness of those
fixed or abstracted eyes. Suddenly he was aware of two men who were
reeling toward him under the influence of this drug-like intoxication,
and he was startled by a likeness which one of them bore to some one
he had seen; but where, and under what circumstances, he could not
determine. The fatuous eye, the features of complacent vanity and
self-satisfied reverie were there, either intensified by drink, or
perhaps suggesting it through some other equally hopeless form of
hallucination. He turned and followed the man, trying to identify
him through his companion, who appeared to be a petty tradesman of a
shrewder, more material type. But in vain, and as the pair turned into
a side street the consul slowly retraced his steps. But he had not
proceeded far before the recollection that had escaped him returned, and
he knew that the likeness suggested by the face he had seen was that of
Malcolm McHulish.

III.

A journey to Kelpie Island consisted of a series of consecutive episodes
by rail, by coach, and by steamboat. The consul was already familiar
with them, as indeed were most of the civilized world, for it seemed
that all roads at certain seasons led out of and returned to St.
Kentigern as a point in a vast circle wherein travelers were sure
to meet one another again, coming or going, at certain depots and
caravansaries with more or less superiority or envy. Tourists on the
road to the historic crags of Wateffa came sharply upon other tourists
returning from them