"I think it is this way with men," said he, "they do not bear transplanting. The real soil in which the mind grows is the social condition to which it is accustomed. Minds die when torn up by the roots from everything to which they have been used to. Then there are some men whose bodies are affected by their minds, and to whom mental decay means bodily decay--that is how it is." All this was Greek to Jacques. "You will get all right," said he; "a turn with the Arabs will put new life in you, and they say we are likely to be sent down south after them any day." But the expedition against the Arabs did not come off, and Karasloff did not get all right; on the contrary the mysterious malady that had seized him developed with alarming rapidity, it was acute phthisis; he was taken into hospital, and one day Jacques, receiving an urgent message, went there to find him dying. Karasloff had sent for him to speak to him about Ivan. They had a long talk, and after it Jacques returned to barracks looking troubled and perplexed. Karasloff died the next day and was buried on the day following in the cemetery of the légionnaires with military honours. It was decided between Jacques and El Kobir to say nothing to Ivan about the death of his father. "Life has trouble enough," said the old man. "He would gain nothing by knowing--only grief; we will tell him that his father has gone on a journey. I will keep him in my house and he will be to me as my own child, and you can come to see him of an evening as usual." Jacques, nothing loth, agreed, and things went on just as before with the exception of Karasloff's absence from the evening meetings at the shop of El Kobir. The effect of the child on Jacques had been profound. This scamp, who had started in life as an Apache and who had gone through the fire of the Legion, so that one might have fancied his soul scorched for ever, developed under the influence of the child quite unsuspected qualities and possibilities. The miraculous and sometimes appalling influence of mind upon mind, and personality upon personality, was never more in evidence than in the case of Ivan and Jacques. You might have preached to Jacques; you might have beaten him, tortured him, shown him visions or showered wisdom upon him without producing any permanent effect upon his cynical bandit mind, not an evil mind, but a mind set in narrow ways, with narrow and oblique outlooks upon life. Ivan touched the humanity in the man because Ivan was absolutely human. I think children are the only real human beings, other people are either men or women. However that may be, in the presence of Ivan Jacques became something like Ivan, a very simple individual, not above playing with wooden soldiers or converting himself into a horse for the child to ride upon.