one. 

 Glance two: directly before me. A wall with many bars fixed across one minute opening. At the opening a dozen, fifteen, grins. Upon the bars hands, scraggy and bluishly white. Through the bars stretching of lean arms, incessant stretchings. The grins leap at the window, hands belonging to them catch hold, arms belonging to the hands stretch in my direction … an instant; the new grins leap from behind and knock off the first grins which go down with a fragile crashing like glass smashed: hands wither and break, arms streak out of sight, sucked inward. 

 In the huge potpourri of misery a central figure clung, shaken but undislodged. Clung like a monkey to central bars. Clung like an angel to a harp. Calling pleasantly in a high boyish voice: “O Jack, give me a cigarette.” 

 A handsome face, dark, Latin smile, musical fingers strong. 

 I waded suddenly through a group of gendarmes (they stood around me watching with a disagreeable curiosity my reaction to this). Strode fiercely to the window. 

 Trillions of hands. 

 Quadrillions of itching fingers. 

 The angel-monkey received the package of cigarettes politely, disappearing with it into howling darkness. I heard his high boy’s voice distributing cigarettes. Then he leaped into sight, poised gracefully against two central bars, saying “Thank you, Jack, good boy” … “Thanks, merci, gracias…” a deafening din of gratitude reeked from within. 

 “Put your baggage in here,” quoth an angry voice. “No, you will not take anything but one blanket in your cell, understand.” In French. Evidently the head of the house speaking. I obeyed. A corpulent soldier importantly lead me to my cell. My cell is two doors away from the monkey-angel, on the same side. The high boy-voice, centralized in a torrent-like halo of stretchings, followed my back. The head himself unlocked a lock. I marched coldly in. The fat soldier locked and chained my door. Four feet went away. I felt in my pocket, finding four cigarettes. I am sorry I did not give these also to the monkey—to the angel. Lifted my eyes and saw my own harp. 

 

III. A PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

 Through the bars I looked into that little and dirty lane whereby I had entered; in which a sentinel, gun on shoulder, and with a huge revolver strapped at his hip, 

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