both in name and reality, has been banished for thirty years. Yet for all that we are in the Middle Ages. Young men assume monkish cowls, wear the tonsure and dream of convent life. They compose legends and perform miracle-plays, paint Madonnas and carve images of Christ, drawing their inspiration from the magician,[2] who has bewitched them with Tristan and Isolde, Parzival and the Holy Grail. Crusades against Jews and Turks begin afresh; the Anti-Semites and Philhellenes see to that. Magic and alchemy have already been re-established, and they only wait for the first proved case of witchcraft in order to erect a funeral pile to burn witches on. Middle Ages indeed! Witness the pilgrimages to Lourdes, Tilli-sur-Seine, Rue Jean Goujon. Heaven also gives the sleepy world signs to be ready. The Lord speaks through water-spouts, cyclones, floods, and thunder-storms. Mediæval also is the leprosy which has just appeared again, and against which the doctors of Paris and Berlin have combined. But they were beautiful, the Middle Ages, when men knew how to enjoy and to suffer, when strength and love and beauty in colour, in line, and harmony were revealed for the last time, before they were drowned and sabred by the renaissance of heathenism which is called Protestantism. * * * * * The evening has come, and I burn with desire to renew my meeting with the Unknown, well prepared, as I now am, to confess all and to defend myself before I am condemned. After I have taken my melancholy meal alone I go up the Via Dolorosa, the Rue Bonaparte. This street has never appeared to me so monstrous as this evening; the shop windows yawn like abysses in which Christ is portrayed in many forms --half-martyred, half-triumphant. I go on and on, while the sweat runs in great drops down my face, and the soles of my boots burn my feet, yet I do not seem to advance a step. Am I the Wandering Jew who refused the Redeemer a drink of water? and am I, now that I wish to follow and imitate Him, unable to approach Him? Finally, and without myself knowing how, I find myself before the Fleurus Gate, and in the next moment within the garden, which lies there, dark, damp, and still. Immediately a gust of wind sets the skeletons of the trees in motion, and the Unknown takes up his position quicker as he approaches in his summer-like garment of light. With the same smile as before he invites me to speak.