in places, to claim this or that seat for their own.  In fact, there was so little difference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that I felt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if Nature had been present, I might very well have asked her why, when she had once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on repeating it indefinitely?  How were all those similar souls to know themselves apart in their common eternity?  Merely to have been differently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and I think Nature would have been puzzled to answer me.  But perhaps not; she may have had her reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and that when the type was so fine in most respects as the Italian you could not do better than go on repeating impressions from it.

Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’, who had come down from antiquity to the topmost gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, while his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind.  I have since wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he did not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’.

II.

I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus I have mentioned.  This event was one that I have often witnessed elsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping.  The top of the outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet.  At its base an immense net was stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing the guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with his own hands.  While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even from the loveliness of the officer of ‘bersaglieri’.  There the man in the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and looked up at her.

She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, “Is it all right?”

He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, “Yes; keep to the left,” and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before she reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh.