‘HE THOUGHT HE SAW AN ELEPHANT’ 335 AN EXPLOSION 345 ‘A CANNOT SHAK’ HANDS WI’ THEE!’ 350 THE OTHER PROFESSOR’S FALL 352 ‘TEACHING TIGRESSES TO SMILE’ 365 ‘HORRID WAS THAT PIG’S DESPAIR!’ 367 THE FATAL JUMP 369 ‘BATHING CROCODILES IN CREAM’ 371 ‘THAT PIG LAY STILL AS ANY STONE’ 372 ‘STILL HE SITS IN MISERIE’ 373 ‘BLESSED BY HAPPY STAGS’ 377 THE OLD BEGGAR’S RETURN 382 ‘PORCUPINE!’ 388 ‘GOOD-NIGHT, PROFESSOR!’ 398 ‘HIS WIFE KNELT DOWN AT HIS SIDE’ 404 THE BLUE LOCKET 409 ‘IT IS LOVE!’ 411 SYLVIE AND BRUNO CONCLUDED. CHAPTER I. BRUNO’S LESSONS. During the next month or two my solitary town-life seemed, by contrast, unusually dull and tedious. I missed the pleasant friends I had left behind at Elveston—the genial interchange of thought—the sympathy which gave to one’s ideas a new and vivid reality: but, perhaps more than all, I missed the companionship of the two Fairies—or Dream-Children, for I had not yet solved the problem as to who or what they were—whose sweet playfulness had shed a magic radiance over my life. In office-hours—which I suppose reduce most men to the mental condition of a coffee-mill or a mangle—time sped along much as usual: it was in the pauses of life, the desolate hours when books and newspapers palled on the sated appetite, and when, thrown back upon one’s own dreary musings, one strove—all in vain—to people the vacant air with the dear faces of absent friends, that the real bitterness of solitude made itself felt. One evening, feeling my life a little more wearisome than usual, I strolled down to my Club, not so much with the hope of meeting any friend there, for London was now ‘out of town,’ as with the feeling that here, at least, I should hear ‘sweet words of human speech,’ and come into contact with human thought. However, almost the first face I saw there _was_ that of a friend. Eric Lindon was lounging, with rather a ‘bored’ expression of face, over a newspaper; and we fell into conversation with a mutual satisfaction which neither of us tried to conceal.