t
affected him pleasantly. Every one seemed to speak gayly to every one.
Two cab-drivers exchanged swift incivilities, but in a quite perfunctory
way, with evident good-will.

Walking aimlessly as yet--it was too early for tombs--he came again to
that hotel on the circle. They were asleep in there. Little they'd
worried--glad to be so easily rid of him.

Then he noticed at the circle's centre a lofty column wrought in bronze
with infinite small detail. Surmounting that column was the figure of
the Corsican. An upstart who had prevailed!

He left the circle, lest he be apprehended by the Breedes. Soon he was
again in that vast avenue of the park-places where he had slept. And
now, far off on this splendid highway, he descried a mighty arch.
Sternly gray and beautiful it was. And when, standing under it, he
looked aloft to its mighty facade, its grandeur seemed threatening to
him. He knew what that arch was--another monument imposed upon the city
by the imperial assassin--without royal lineage since the passing of
Ram-tah.

"Some class to _that_ upstart!" he muttered. And if Napoleon had been no
one, was it not probable that Bean had not been even Napoleon. The
Countess Casanova had doubtless deceived him, though perhaps
unintentionally. She had seemed a kind woman, he thought, but you
couldn't tell about her controls.

His mind was being washed in that wondrous sunlight.

He was himself an upstart. No doubt about it. But what of it? Here were
columns and arches to commemorate the most egregious of all upstarts.
Upstarts were men who believed in themselves.

He retraced his steps from the arch.

Curious thing that scoundrel Watkins had kept saying on the boat. "As a
man thinketh in his own heart, so is he." Must mean something. What?

Far down that wide avenue he came to a bridge of striking magnificence,
beset with golden sculpture. He supposed it to be one more tribute to
the sublime Corsican who had thought in his heart, and _was_.

He had the meaning of those words now.

He, Bunker Bean, had believed himself to be mean, insignificant. And so
he had been that. Then he had come to believe himself a king, and
straightway had he been kingly. The Corsican, detecting the falsity of
some Ram-tah, would have gone on believing in himself none the less. It
was all that mattered. "As a man thinketh--" If you came down to that,
nobody needed a Ram-tah at all.

From the centre of the bridge he raised his eyes and th