moniously turned his back on him, having just then reached the end of his short beat.

'What impudence!' muttered Guillermo. 'What's the matter with these people to-night?'

The light in the vestibule greeted him, however, with the same ceremonious but hospitable radiance as ever, like the set smile of a dignified but benignant butler. That was the only welcome he got, for no one came to the door. Thoroughly indignant, he at last stalked in, walking heavily across the rugs and saying almost aloud: 'Queer service they have here. You'd be received with more attention at a church.'

But his words apparently made no sound, and Guillermo, growing more indignant and uneasy every moment, started to take off his overcoat. But he found he was not wearing one. In fact, he did not seem to have on any clothes at all.

Finding himself in this plight, Guillermo, who had left the afternoon tea at the Grand Hotel dressed correctly for the reception, paused in utter bewilderment. How could he have lost his clothing coming down in the bus? And what a peculiar sensation of nudity he had! It was as if he had slipped out of his clothing through the collar. He looked at himself with the same stupefaction that the first serpent must have felt when it sloughed its skin. He seemed to have retained his normal body, but it had none the less an unreal and unsubstantial quality. He felt as if a puff of wind might blow him away.

Thinking he must have lost his mind, he turned, and, staring at the tapestries, the ancient suits of armor, and the heavy carved furniture of the entrance hall, he exclaimed: 'Lord God, what has happened to me!'

From the drawing-room came the

notes of the same fox-trot that he had been humming half an hour before. A faint odor of delicate perfumery filled the air. The door of a large clothes-closet stood open, half revealing the furs and ladies' wraps that hung inside. Guillermo saw all this distinctly indeed, with extraordinary vividness. The place seemed perfectly natural except for his own strange condition. And then a full realization of the fearful impropriety of the situation suddenly overwhelmed him. He blushed scarlet and muttered blankly, 'What shall I do?'

He could not stay there in the very middle of the entrance hall. If he went back into the street there was no knowing what would happen. But suppose somebody should come out from the drawing-room or new guests should come in from outside? How could he explain the situation? For he had no doubt whatever that he had in some mysterious way lost his clothes. He tried to think up some excuse. Had he in fact been temporarily insane? But his present remarkable mental lucidity made that seem incredible.

Acting on the impulse of the moment, and hoping that some lucky accident would enable him to escape from his predicament, he concealed himself behind a huge Chinese porcelain vase until he could have time to think it over. At this moment he was again vividly conscious of the sensation of extraordinary well-being that he had felt in the bus. Although he realized that he was in the house of his fiancée without his clothing, and without any explanation for being there, he could not rid himself of a secret sense of comfort in the situation.

'Really, it is n't so bad here behind this beautiful vase. It is as blue as the heavens in the twilight. Man makes such a complicated thing of life. Why

worry when we can be so comfortable in a tiny corner like this?'

Guillermo began to lose all sense of time. Now and then servants would pass, winking their eyes and dropping remarks. The young man grew more and more indifferent to his external surroundings, however, and increasingly absorbed in the tranquil, meditative mood that had now, for the first time in his life, come over him. But just then a voice and a perfume too familiar to escape attention forced him to take notice.

His fiancée came out clothed in white silk, almost like a bride, talking with her bosom friend. The two had their heads so close together, and spoke so softly and confidentially, that it would ordinarily have been impossible to hear a word. They were evidently discussing him and his inexplicable absence. His fiancée seemed very sad and disappointed. 'I'm sure he does n't love me,' she finally murmured.

Guillermo heard her say this without any special emotion. He merely thought to himself: 'That's so. I'm not in love with her. I'm not sure that I may not have loved her sometime, but I don't now. I'm simply indifferent. Why should I be engaged? Love is such a complicated affair.' And after the two girls left, evidently in great distress, he studied the color of the vase, whose deep, clear blue intrigued him as if it were a window into the infinite. His only desire was to simplify existence, to reduce it to its ultimate terms, to enjoy the mere sensation of color as displayed in the porcelain before him. He felt as if he could make himself infinitely small and lose himself among the golden dragons there.

It was in this impassive and indifferent attitude toward the human world about him that he saw the guests begin

VOL. 328-NO. 4258

to depart. What was happening around him interested him less and less. But he heard his name spoken in the world that lay on the other side of the Chinese vase. The word caught his attention.

Perico Oñate, his boon companion in athletics and society, stopped to exchange a word with Felipe, a cousin of his fiancée.

'You will be the most called upon,' said Perico, 'since you are a member of the family.'

'Yes, but I, my lad, am not the right person for such things.'

'Nevertheless, it will be incumbent on you.'

'Poor Bill!'

'Poor? Why?' thought Guillermo himself. 'What has happened to make them pity me that way?' As a matter of fact, he had never felt better in his life.

'And how did it happen?' Felipe asked again, with a sort of inquisitive interest that grated on Guillermo's sensibilities.

'Oh, crossing a street,' answered his friend. 'It seems he was trying to catch a bus because he could n't find a taxi, and a car ran over him.' 'Killed him instantly?' 'Yes, instantly.'

The disagreeable sense of interest with which Guillermo had followed the conversation of his friend changed completely as a light of revelation burst upon him. He was dead! Dead! He now understood his marvelous lucidity. He was dead, and had died without knowing it; and so he had left his body without any of the usual ceremony and tediousness of death. Most people die gradually, conscious that they are going, feeling their life ebb away drop by drop. Now he understood the meaning of that ritual prayer of the Church: 'From battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.'

By dying thus unprepared and unawares he might be incurring some future unpleasantness. In the providential dispensations of the Eternal everything has its proper hour, and the soul that, conscious of the fact of death, continues to cleave to this world and does not enter into eternal life while the gate stands open finds that gate shut against it later, unless it be opened by some miracle.

Guillermo bethought himself that he could hardly expect a miracle, and that it was therefore imperative to repair the error of thus imprudently departing from mortal life at the entrance of a cabaret, with no time to dwell upon the great mystery of eternity, and careless of all the holy and traditional accompaniments of such a departure. He must bestir himself, lest it already be too late. Surely it would be neither dignified nor proper to spend eternity in the hallway of a sumptuous mansion behind a blue China vase with golden dragons on it.

He was no longer embarrassed by his nudity now that he knew the truth. The only persons who ever departed on their last journey properly clothed were the souls of the Cæsars and the Roman Senators, who were burned on funeral pyres with their togas and purple mantles. But what did it matter if he was a naked soul among the infinite number of others in the same predicament? The important thing was to save himself, not to be left stranded on the margin of this world, a spirit in eternal purgatory. What could he do? It was already too late to pray, for the dead cannot pray for themselves. He could not expect his fiancée to pray for him. She would weep for him, but she would never think of praying for him. It took a different kind of love to comprehend the needs of those beyond the tomb.

through his mind, Guillermo observed that one of the golden dragons on the blue vase was biting its tail. This suggested to him that he must spur himself to immediate action and make up for lost time. Passing between his departing friends, who, though they did not see him, fell silent for a moment and instinctively shuddered, he went out upon the street.

How gloomy and dull and insupportable the city seemed! Seen with the eyes of a disincarnate spirit, everyday life had lost its rhythm, and had become a grotesque, erratic, mechanical, ugly dance. For all that makes life supportable is the illusion of life itself. A spirit looking upon human existence from the outside perceives at once all its poverty and futility. People had become insufferable to him. He did not dislike them because they were still living- he merely found them uninteresting and ridiculous. What fools, what petty creatures, to be so absorbed in trivialities when the great blue arch of the infinite swung above them!

So he kept on without looking this way or that, without being distracted by anything in his course, drawn by an irresistible impulse to the scene of the accident. A bloodstain was still visible on the asphalt - his own blood. A little group of curious people remained standing at the curb discussing the incident in an empty-headed way.

'He was very young.' 'Poor young fellow!'

'And he had just left the dance.' 'Who would have thought it? Death comes when you least expect it.'

snuffed out. The whole scene revolted Guillermo. He would have liked to invest himself with some phosphorescent form to put these curious spectators in a panic. But that would have been to become an ordinary ghost, a real soul in torment. So he tore himself away from the spot with a sudden effort. Had he tarried a moment longer he would have become the 'Carrera de San Jerónimo ghost.'

Thereupon another, a stronger and nobler, attraction drew him powerfully toward his body. The great room in the hospital was white and cold and filled with the smell of chloroform and antiseptics. A corpse lay on an operating-table surrounded by surgeons, nurses, and medical students. Guillermo realized instantly that this was not his body. His body lay in a little room to one side reserved by his family. But he did not go to it at once. Some impulse caused him to restrain that longing.

Instead he drew near the dissecting-table. A thrill of horror overcame him. The mutilated cadaver lying there abandoned by its spirit filled him with the same loathing that he would have felt in stumbling over the ragged, dirty, discarded garments of a beggar lying in the street. A fraction of an instant sufficed to drive him away in unutterable disgust.

He went directly to his own body. His parents and brothers and all the little circle of family mourners had gathered there. He could see tears and hear sobs. His father stood bowed down with the noble grief of the sower who sees his harvest ruined. His mother sat in a sort of stupor, saying

nothing, neither sobbing nor weeping. His brothers were trembling with grief. The soul of Guillermo saw all this without emotion. His family seemed strangely alien and separated from him, like all other humans.

But there lay his body, with his own features, his own hands, his own arms -all the apparatus that had made him but an hour or so ago part and parcel of the great world. An infinite longing to possess that body again seized him. Casting himself upon it, he exclaimed with all the energy of his soul: 'Live!'

'It moved,' exclaimed one of those present.

'Impossible,' said a doctor- 'just an accidental jar.'

But Guillermo, lying on the cold hospital table, managed to open his eyes for just one second and to exchange a rapid glance with his parents and brothers. He now was conscious of a deep, agonizing sympathy with their grief. He knew his hour had struck, that he could not retrace his path, that the moment of final separation had come. All the energy of his soul had been required for that single instant of communion. He felt himself gently drawn away by a superior power, his eyes turned glassy, and the chill rigidity of death crept over his corpse. But two tears now trembled on his lashes.

Thus Guillermo, consciously dying in full possession of his faculties, entered by the straight path into the kingdom that no human eye can penetrate. The door to Eternity stood open before him. He passed through the last portal.

THERE is a music-hall song, commonly attributed to Mr. J. C. Squire, in which the first line of the chorus runs

Everyone's a highbrow to someone.

Like the woodpeckers, the highbrows are divided into the greater and the lesser; but the subdivisions among the highbrows are more numerous than among the woodpeckers. There are the Greater Barred Highbrow, at least he ought to be barred by all sensible men, and the Greater Bored Highbrow, and the Long-eared Highbrow, and the Tufted Highbrow, and the Wild Highbrow, and the Common Highbrow, and the Lesser Swallowtailed Highbrow, and the Greater Crested Highbrow, and the Red-necked Highbrow, and Wemmick's Highbrow, and the Black-hearted Highbrow, and the Glaucous Highbrow, and the Scandinavian Lesser Bearded Highbrow, and the Mute Highbrow, and the Blue Female Highbrow, and the Whooper Highbrow, and the Northern Great Spotted Highbrow; and even this is only an imperfect and tentative list of the subspecies into which this great family of wingless birds has been divided by the leading Altafrontists.

I confess, however, that not until the present week did I realize the existence of a subspecies hitherto unnamed by men of science, and which, till a better name be found for it, we may call the Lesser Racing Highbrow. I discovered him by chance in the

1 From the New Statesman (London Independent weekly), December 5

columns of the Sunday Express. At least, I discovered there a reference to him that put me on his track. It was in "Tattenham's' article on the close of the flat racing season and on the fact that during the next few months the mind of the nation will be concentrated on jumping. 'I do not want it to be thought,' says 'Tattenham' in the course of his article, 'that I am one of those highbrows who have no use for jumping.' When I read this sentence I realized at once that a new highbrow had swum into my ken. Strange, I had never before thought of the little halfcrown punter who gives up betting every year between the Manchester November Handicap and the Lincolnshire Handicap as a highbrow. But, as the song I have quoted says, 'Everyone's a highbrow to someone,' and, if the little punter who will not bet on jumping is a highbrow to "Tattenham,' that is good enough for me. Is he, I wonder, as proud of being a highbrow as other highbrows are? And, as he leaves the tobacconist's without having made a bet, do his acquaintances mock him, saying: 'He's a highbrow, he is. Looks down on jumping, he does, as if he was Bacon or Aristotle. What's his blooming size in halos? Blimey, the intelligentsia makes me sick'?

But even the men who continue to follow racing during the jumping season descend, I am sure, through a hundred stages of highbrowism till you reach a little lonely figure who is a highbrow only to his dog or his canary. Even during the jumping season the man who