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identification of M. le Professeur with the pleasantly regarded Américain Carroll. “ Il frequente le chien et le chat ,” explained the citizen who finally realized whom they sought. “He talks to everyone.” And therefore he had not been thought of a professor.
    He escorted them to point out, helpfully, a not particularly trim cottage built upon the site of some former industrial complex. It could only have been the cannon foundry of Napoleonic times. By that time the hour was not far from sunset. There was a bed of flowers outside the cottage, badly in need of attention. There was a section of antique stone wall with the remnants of window-openings to be detected. There were piles of stone, once painstakingly separated from the walls whose upper courses they had formed. Now they were moss-grown and grass-penetrated while they waited for purchasers to cart them away for other structures. No purchaser had appeared. Perhaps no new houses had been built.
    Pepe said:
    “ Dios mio! He lives here?”
    “I think,” admitted Harrison, “that we’re making fools of ourselves.”
    “Nothing,” said Pepe, “would give me greater pleasure than to find proof of exactly that statement! Let’s hope!”
    He advanced to the door of the cottage. He knocked. There was a rustling inside. He knocked again. Dead silence. He knocked a third time.
    There were footsteps. They seemed reluctant. The door opened a crack. An eye peered out. That was all. Then a voice said irritably, within:
    “ Bien! Q’est? ”
    Pepe turned astonished eyes to Harrison. There are voices one does not forget and which one recognizes even when they are speaking in French and one has heard them speaking only Mid-Western English with the words “Mary,” “marry” and “merry” not to be told from one another. Harrison nodded. He swallowed.
    The single eye continued to regard the two of them around the barely-cracked door. The familiar voice said impatiently:
    “ Q’il est? ”
    The possessor of the eye did not answer. Harrison raised his voice, in English:
    “Professor Carroll, my name is Harrison and I have Pepe Ybarra with me. We took statistical analysis under you at Brevard. Remember?”
    Silence for a moment. Then the familiar voice said:
    “Now, what the hell?” It paused. “Wait a minute!”
    There were scufflings. A woman’s voice. Carroll’s voice said in an undertone something like, “ Il n’parle .” There was a grunting, and footsteps moved heavily away. Less heavy footsteps went with them. The eye at the cracked door removed itself, but the door remained stationary, as if some one had his foot firmly against it to prevent its being opened by force. Carroll’s voice said something indistinguishable again in French—and then there were sounds as if someone had been impatiently brushed out of the way. Then the door opened. Carroll stared unbelievingly at Harrison and at Pepe on his doorstep.
    He was tall and broad as Harrison remembered him, but he was clothed like a Frenchman, which is to say as no professor of methodology and statistical analysis would ordinarily be clothed. He wore corduroy trousers, and his shirt looked as if his wife had made it. He wore French shoes.
    He looked from one to the other, and shook his head in astonishment.
    “It is Harrison!” he said profoundly. “And Ybarra! Who’d have believed it? What in hell are you doing in France? Particularly, what the hell are you doing in St. Jean-sur-Seine? And what are you doing on my door-step? Come in!”
    He stepped aside. Harrison entered with Pepe close behind him. The room contained furniture of the sort an inhabitant of St. Jean-sur-Seine would consider tasteful. It was atrocious. It contained a short, plump Frenchman in a state of apparently desperate agitation. He was attired like a minor and not-too-prosperous bourgeois of the year approximately 1800. His shoes were clumsy. His stockings were of coarse worsted. The cloth of his major garments was