"Never saw me! Why, our hands crossed over the dishes. Can I then make myself invisible?" "Well, it is funny anyhow." When I delve in my memory, I bring now forgotten incidents to light, which were hitherto valueless to a sceptic whose mind had been sterilised by the study of the exact sciences. Thus I remember the morning of my first wedding day. It was a winter Sunday, peculiarly quiet and unnaturally solemn for me who was preparing to quit an impure bachelor life and to settle down by the domestic hearth with the woman I loved. I felt I should like to take my breakfast, the last in my bachelor life, quite alone, and with this object I went down to an underground café in a low street. It was a basement-room lit with gas. After ordering breakfast, I noticed that I was being watched by a number of men who were sitting, obviously in a state of intoxication, round their bottles, since the previous evening. They looked spectrally pale, uncouth, shabby; they were hoarse-voiced and disgusting, after a night spent in debauchery. Among the company I recognised two friends of my youth, who had so come down in the world that they had neither house nor home nor occupation, notorious good-for-nothings, not far from committing some crime. It was not pride which made me shrink from renewing the acquaintanceship; it was the fear of a relapse in the mire, the dislike of finding myself placed back in my past,--for I had gone through a similar stage. At last, when the comparatively soberest of them, chosen as an envoy, stood up in order to approach my table, I was seized with terror. Firmly resolved to deny my identity if necessary, I fix my eyes on my assailant, and without my knowing how it happened he remained standing for a moment before my table, and then with a silly expression, which I can never forget, he makes an apology and returns to his place. He had been prepared to swear that it was I, and yet he did not recognise me. Then they began to discuss my alibi. "It is he certainly." "Yes, the Devil take me, it is!" I quit the place filled with shame at myself and pity for the poor fellows, but in the depth of my heart glad at having escaped such a hateful existence. Escaped! Apart from the moral aspect of the question the strange fact remains, that one can so alter one's physiognomy as to be irrecognisable by an old acquaintance whom one meets and I salutes all through the year in the street. * * * * *