times, together with a hundred other
incidents, just as a chance tag of association recalled them to his
swift and picturesque memory. He would, indeed, make a show of fixing
dates by reference to his temporary profession; but so Protean seem to
have been his changes of fortune in their number and rapidity that I
could never keep count of them or their order. Nor does it matter. The
man's life was as disconnected as a pack of cards.

My first meeting with him happened in this wise.

I had been motoring in a listless, solitary fashion about Languedoc. A
friend who had stolen a few days from anxious business in order to
accompany me from Boulogne through Touraine and Guienne had left me at
Toulouse; another friend whom I had arranged to pick up at Avignon on
his way from Monte Carlo was unexpectedly delayed. I was therefore
condemned to a period of solitude somewhat irksome to a man of a
gregarious temperament. At first, for company's sake, I sat in front
by my chauffeur, McKeogh. But McKeogh, an atheistical Scotch mechanic
with his soul in his cylinders, being as communicative as his own
differential, I soon relapsed into the equal loneliness and greater
comfort of the back.

In this fashion I left Montpellier one morning on my leisurely eastward
journey, deciding to break off from the main road, striking due south,
and visit Aigues-Mortes on the way.

Aigues-Mortes was once a flourishing Mediterranean town. St. Louis and
his Crusaders sailed thence twice for Palestine; Charles V. and Francis
I. met there and filled the place with glittering state. But now its
glory has departed. The sea has receded three or four miles, and left
it high and dry in the middle of bleak salt marshes, useless, dead and
desolate, swept by the howling mistral and scorched by the blazing sun.
The straight white ribbon of road which stretched for miles through the
plain, between dreary vineyards--some under water, the black shoots of
the vines appearing like symmetrical wreckage above the surface--was at
last swallowed up by the grim central gateway of the town, surmounted
by its frowning tower. On each side spread the brown machicolated
battlements that vainly defended the death-stricken place. A soft
northern atmosphere would have invested it in a certain mystery of
romance, but in the clear southern air, the towers and walls standing
sharply defined against the blue, wind-swept sky, it looked naked and
pitiful, like a poor ghost caught i