s head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

"You may urge that Coleridge--a lazy man and a forgetful--is just
repeating himself. But there's a shade of difference; and I'll
undertake to deliver back Farrell in whichever condition you
prefer; or even to split the shade. But you must give me time.

"As it was, I risked nothing in paying an ordinary professional.
Farrell walked into the office, and my man followed him.
Farrell took some time discussing his route with the clerk.
My man borrowed the use of a telephone-box, left the door open
and rang me up. By the time he was put through he had heard all
he needed. So he closed the door, and reported. I instructed
him, of course, to buy me a similar ticket. 'And,' said my man,
'he is inquiring which is the best hotel at Monte Carlo, and it
seems he hardly knows any French." 'Right,' said I. 'Come
along at once and collect your fee, for I haven't any time to
spare.'

"I thought it possible that Farrell might break his journey to
dally with the gaieties of Paris. But he didn't. I found out
easily enough at Cook's Office there that he had booked a
sleeper and gone straight through. So I went to the Opera,
listened to _Rigoletto_, idled most of the next day in the old
haunts, and took the usual Sud-Express, with a sleeper, from the
Gare de Lyons.

"No: I lie. You can't call it idling when you sit--say in the
Bois, on any chance bench anywhere--seeing nothing, letting the
carriages go by like an idle show of phenomena, but with your
whole soul thrilling to a new idea, drinking it in, pushing out
new fibres which grow as they suck in more of it through small
new ducts, with a ripple and again a choke and yet again a
gurgle, which you orchestrate into a sound of deep waters
combining as you draw them home. . . . Oh, yes--you may laugh:
but I know now what conception is: what Shakespeare felt like
when he sat one night, in a garden, and the great plot of
_Othello_ came teeming. . . .

"Please bear one thing in mind, my dear Roddy, You are never, now
or hereafter, to pity me. _Qualis artifex_. . . . I used to
smile to myself in a cocksure youthful way when great men hinted
in great books that one had to make burnt-sacrifice of the e