catch him and keep him in a bottle, and label it 'the learned
homunculus.'"

"What dialect is it he is talking in?" said Henry; "I don't remember to
have heard it before."

The publisher smiled: "My dear fellow, you must be careful what you say.
That is what we call 'the Oxford voice.'"

"How remarkable!" said Henry, his attention called off by a being with a
face that half suggested a faun, and half suggested a flower,--a small,
olive-skinned face crowned with purply black hair, that kept falling in
an elflock over his forehead, and violet eyes set slant-wise. He was
talking earnestly of fairies, in a beautiful Irish accent, and Henry
liked him. The attraction seemed mutual, and Henry found himself drawn
into a remarkable relation about a fairy-hill in Connemara, and fairy
lights that for several nights had been seen glimmering about it; and
how at last he--that is, the narrator--and a particularly hard-headed
friend of his had kept watch one moonlit night, with the result that
they had actually seen and talked with the queen of the fairies and
learned many secrets of the ----. The narrator here made use of a long,
unpronounceable Irish word, which Henry could not catch.

"I should have explained some of these phenomena to you," whispered the
publisher presently, noticing that Henry looked a little bewildered.
"This is a young Irish poet, who, in the intervals of his raising the
devil, writes very beautiful lyrics that he may well have learned from
the fairies. It is his method to seem mad on magic and such things. You
will meet with many strange methods here to-night. Don't be alarmed if
some one comes and talks to you about strange sins. You have come to
London in the 'strange sins' period. I will explain afterwards."

He had hardly spoken when a pallid young man, with a preternatural
length and narrowness of face, began to talk to him about the sins of
the Borgias.

"I suppose you never committed a murder yourself?" he asked Henry,
languidly.

"No," said Henry, catching the spirit of the foolishness; "no, not yet.
I am keeping that--" implying that he was reserving so extreme a
stimulant till all his other vices failed him.

Presently there entered a tall young man with a long, thin face,
curtained on either side with enormous masses of black hair, like a slip
of the young moon glimmering through a pine-wood.

At the same moment there entered, as if by design, his very antithesis:
a short, firmly built,