When God Laughs and Other Stories

*His was a wise and instinctive temperateness that savoured of the Greek. Yet he was far from Greek. *I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard,* I have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and ancient races, what with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and primitiveness of his features.

His eyes, under massively arched brows, were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before them was perpetually falling down a great black mop of hair through which he gazed like a roguish satyr ftflfrom a thicket. He invariably wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his necktie was Thflred. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man.

Also, he had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather-banded sombrero.*