talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some

one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has

lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one's

nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an

outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue

with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of

Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after

those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own

audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,

blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.

The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,

used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself

at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice.

One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard

to cry out, "I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the

stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the

ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have

thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, the

formation of colours, of smell, and of taste." There was something

fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but

let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy

cast the first stone at him.

Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they

would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the

normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this

weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious.

The Man Who Laughs