Frenchman carried me
off elsewhere. He had not defined our destination very clearly, and I
had not made inquiries, caring little where I went; but I was a little
put out at finding myself, after passing a guard of soldiers who stared
curiously, and going down many flights of steps, in an anarchist's
club.

Perhaps the government of his most Catholic Majesty Alfonzo XIII. can
hardly be termed paternal; but that was nothing to me. Politics I
abhor, and anarchistic politics I particularly loathe. But as beating
an abrupt retreat would have been rude, and as unnecessary rudeness is
not one of my characteristics, I made the best of it, and stayed and
looked about me.

One room of the place had been fitted up as a kind of chapel, with
ecclesiastical candles and other properties on a table at the farther
end, with portraits of Mazzini, Gambetta, Prim, and other worthies of
the Red Kidney on the walls, and with orderly pews on either side of
the central aisle. In this cellar temple a preacher was just winding up
a fervid discourse on the comparative merits of melinite and blasting
gelatine as we came up, and a minute later I was being introduced to
him. I think he was the leanest man I ever came across. He stood good
six feet high, and couldn't have weighed more than seven stone. You
could almost see the bone of his face through the thin covering of
skin; and if one might judge from the fact that his smart black
frockcoat fitted like a stocking, it was fair to surmise that he was
actually proud of his leanness. One got the idea that all the
nourishment of his body had gone out into his long white beard.

We went out of the general hall into a smaller room, where we sat and
smoked.

Taltavull, my new acquaintance, was simply charming. Till that night I
had thought that an anarchist could only attain to his peculiar creed
through the most comprehensive ignorance; but this man had arrived at
the result through the diametrically opposite path. He spoke almost all
European languages with fluency, and knew Lingua Franca, Arabic, and
Sanscrit. I never met any one so widely read; nor was his reading
superficial; and he possessed a memory that refused nothing. He could
quote verbatim page after page of such writers as Schopenhauer,
Voltaire, Mazzini. And far better than this, he had studied men of
every grade in the living flesh. What his nationality was I couldn't
say, though I should guess him as either a Pole or an Italian; but