Snowdrops from a Curate’s Garden

ments of electric measurement, a series of articles on a micrococcus which he supposed himself to have discovered (his only failure, for he proved himself to be mistaken, and manfully recanted in a very honourable letter to the Editor), a short study of heraldry, which made an immense impression on the small body of thinkers who interest them- selves in this curious question, and his revolution- ary masterpiece upon the relation between Com- parative Anatomy and Political Science. In his personal life he had similar breadth of experience. He was beloved of the thieves and prostitutes in an obscure drinking-cellar in Belleville, the most dangerous quarter of Paris, not as a comrade, but as a missionary. He was at home in the most ex- alted social circles, and it is a well-known fact that many persons of importance relied on his subtle intuition and keen vision to resolve political diffi- culties which baffled their less fertile brains. Sought after by rich and poor for his personal beauty, he yielded to none, save a single boat- captain on a Seine steamer, to whom he continued faithful until his marriage. But the devotion of his young and beautiful wife exacted too much, im- posed too severe a strain upon his constitu- tion. They had been married barely a week when he took her to the infamous T . . . . . . Club in Cairo, where the dissolute officers of the Army of Occupation, merchants, fish-porters, pimps, all the cream of Egyptian society and its dregs, gathered every Wednesday night to commit appalling orgies. He gave her to their tender mercies and saw her violated a dozen times before his eyes. In a month no more debauched woman walked the streets than this dainty English girl. She became a mother, after innumerable adul- teries on both sides, committed shamelessly in each other’s presence, even in spinthriae of ten or [6]