It was during this stay in England that Millar met a lady to whom he became engaged, and the poet would have married her had her parents not discovered in time that the wild man of the illimitable plains had already a wife and child stranded somewhere on the South Pacific Coast. Joaquin Millar became in time quite a civilized Christian, and I reflect, with some natural satisfaction, that I was the humble means in the hands of Providence that, some years after our first frigid meeting, succeeded in inducing him to get his hair cut. An immense social and moral rehabilitation followed this sacrifice on the part of a poet who had his share of the Divine afflatus. What he lost in picturesqueness he gained in self-respect, and during his brief sojourns in London he figured as a Bohemian observant of the conventions, and possessed of a certain subtle humour, which rendered his society very agreeable to his club mates at the Savage. The travelling American millionaire is a strange portent in his way; but to me a far more wonderful thing is the American who on a small and irregular pay, often derived from correspondence with some third-rate newspaper, supplemented by the proceeds of a few magazine articles, manages to travel all over the habitable globe. You will meet them—cultivating literature on a little oatmeal—in London, in Paris, in Rome, in St. Petersburg, in Tokio, in Honolulu. They are always waiting for remittances, and they are always on the move. One of these wanderers I met at Millar’s rooms in Bloomsbury. She was a fine woman—robust, large-eyed, sentimental, but with a certain saving sense of humour. Her sole means were derived from a weekly letter written for a San Francisco newspaper. Yet she was setting out to do what she called “the grand tower.” She was not so lucky as the others. I met her at the same rooms a year afterwards. She had just returned from “the grand tower.” She looked awfully worn and ill, and she was accompanied by a gigantic brigand, who had not a word of any language save his own incommunicable patois. He breathed hard and scowled and shrugged his shoulders while he rolled his eyes and smoked innumerable cigarettes. His name, even when gently broken to us by his fair introducer, was a wholly impossible thing. But he was a Count—or so he said. And the infatuated correspondent of the Californian paper was “my lady,” for she had married the brute. The Count had probably been a Neapolitan luggage-porter, or something of the kind, and my own private opinion is that he beat the poor woman and otherwise ill-treated her.