ms in order; but he's absent-minded. Sometimes his
great bright eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are
there. Now absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We
think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can't think of a wicked man who is
honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren't think of a wicked man
alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured man. It
means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise. But how will
you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill
you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty.
Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt
that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might
ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour
with an absent-minded tiger?"

"And what do you think of Sunday, Gogol?" asked Syme.

"I don't think of Sunday on principle," said Gogol simply, "any more
than I stare at the sun at noonday."

"Well, that is a point of view," said Syme thoughtfully. "What do you
say, Professor?"

The Professor was walking with bent head and trailing stick, and he did
not answer at all.

"Wake up, Professor!" said Syme genially. "Tell us what you think of
Sunday."

The Professor spoke at last very slowly.

"I think something," he said, "that I cannot say clearly. Or, rather,
I think something that I cannot even think clearly. But it is something
like this. My early life, as you know, was a bit too large and loose.

"Well, when I saw Sunday's face I thought it was too large--everybody
does, but I also thought it was too loose. The face was so big, that one
couldn't focus it or make it a face at all. The eye was so far away from
the nose, that it wasn't an eye. The mouth was so much by itself,
that one had to think of it by itself. The whole thing is too hard to
explain."

He paused for a little, still trailing his stick, and then went on--

"But put it this way. Walking up a road at night, I have seen a lamp
and a lighted window and a cloud make together a most complete and
unmistakable face. If anyone in heaven has that face I shall know him
again. Yet when I walked a little farther I found that there was no
face, that the window was ten yards away, the lamp ten hundred yards,
the cloud beyond the world. Well, Sunday's face escaped me; it ran away
to right and left, as such chance pictures run away. And so his