a final
advance of all things. He was, in his own fancy, a conspirator, fierce
and up to date. In the long, dark afternoons of the Highland winter, he
plotted and fumed in the dark. He drew plans of the capture of London on
the desolate sand of Arisaig.

When he came up to capture London, it was not with an army of white
cockades, but with a stick and a satchel. London overawed him a little,
not because he thought it grand or even terrible, but because it
bewildered him; it was not the Golden City or even hell; it was Limbo.
He had one shock of sentiment, when he turned that wonderful corner of
Fleet Street and saw St. Paul's sitting in the sky.

"Ah," he said, after a long pause, "that sort of thing was built under
the Stuarts!" Then with a sour grin he asked himself what was
the corresponding monument of the Brunswicks and the Protestant
Constitution. After some warning, he selected a sky-sign of some pill.

Half an hour afterwards his emotions left him with an emptied mind on
the same spot. And it was in a mood of mere idle investigation that he
happened to come to a standstill opposite the office of _The Atheist_.
He did not see the word "atheist", or if he did, it is quite possible
that he did not know the meaning of the word. Even as it was, the
document would not have shocked even the innocent Highlander, but for
the troublesome and quite unforeseen fact that the innocent Highlander
read it stolidly to the end; a thing unknown among the most enthusiastic
subscribers to the paper, and calculated in any case to create a new
situation.

With a smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his school, the
editor of _The Atheist_ had put first in his paper and most prominently
in his window an article called "The Mesopotamian Mythology and its
Effects on Syriac Folk Lore." Mr. Evan MacIan began to read this quite
idly, as he would have read a public statement beginning with a young
girl dying in Brighton and ending with Bile Beans. He received the very
considerable amount of information accumulated by the author with
that tired clearness of the mind which children have on heavy summer
afternoons--that tired clearness which leads them to go on asking
questions long after they have lost interest in the subject and are
as bored as their nurse. The streets were full of people and empty of
adventures. He might as well know about the gods of Mesopotamia as not;
so he flattened his long, lean face against the dim bl