have an anthrax, otherwise called carbuncle.  It is a stupid malady, and serves no good end.  One dies of it—­that is all.  I am neither uncultivated nor rustic.  I honour eloquence and poetry, and live in an innocent union with these goddesses.  I conclude by a piece of advice.  Ladies and gentlemen, on the sunny side of your dispositions, cultivate virtue, modesty, honesty, probity, justice, and love.  Each one here below may thus have his little pot of flowers on his window-sill.  My lords and gentlemen, I have spoken.  The play is about to begin.”

The man who was apparently a sailor, and who had been listening outside, entered the lower room of the inn, crossed it, paid the necessary entrance money, reached the courtyard which was full of people, saw at the bottom of it a caravan on wheels, wide open, and on the platform an old man dressed in a bearskin, a young man looking like a mask, a blind girl, and a wolf.

“Gracious heaven!” he cried, “what delightful people!”

CHAPTER III.

WHERE THE PASSER-BY REAPPEARS.

The Green Box, as we have just seen, had arrived in London.  It was established at Southwark.  Ursus had been tempted by the bowling-green, which had one great recommendation, that it was always fair-day there, even in winter.

The dome of St. Paul’s was a delight to Ursus.

London, take it all in all, has some good in it.  It was a brave thing to dedicate a cathedral to St. Paul.  The real cathedral saint is St. Peter.  St. Paul is suspected of imagination, and in matters ecclesiastical imagination means heresy.  St. Paul is a saint only with extenuating circumstances.  He entered heaven only by the artists’ door.

A cathedral is a sign.  St. Peter is the sign of Rome, the city of the dogma; St. Paul that of London, the city of schism.

Ursus, whose philosophy had arms so long that it embraced everything, was a man who appreciated these shades of difference, and his attraction towards London arose, perhaps, from a certain taste of his for St. Paul.

The yard of the Tadcaster Inn had taken the fancy of Ursus.  It might have been ordered for the Green Box.  It was a theatre ready-made.  It was square, with three sides built round, and a wall forming the fourth.  Against this wall was placed the Green Box, which they were able to draw into the yard, owing to the height of the gate.  A large wooden balcony, roofed over, and supported on posts, on which the rooms of the first story opened, ran round the three fronts of the interior facade of the house, making two right angles.  The windows of the ground floor made boxes, the pavement of the court the pit, and the balcony the gallery.  The Green Box, reared against the wall, was thus in front of a theatre.  It was very like the Globe, where they played “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “The Tempest.”

In a corner behind the Green Box was a stable.