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found himself in a lane so narrow that, looking up, he saw above him only a handbreadth of evening sky a little lighter than the eaves. The paving was here very rough, and there were no lamps; he had to place his hand on the wall of a house to walk on. The contact with solid matter did him good; he felt grateful toward this wall. It suddenly vanished under his palm. There was a doorway here, and the door was open. It gave into an exceedingly narrow passage. I am in luck tonight , he thought, I am lucky to have come upon such an exceedingly narrow passage . He proceeded until he came to a small door. Underneath this door a faint light shone.
    Now for a while he stood perfectly still. In there sleep awaited him, and with the certitude of sleep memory came back to him. He felt, in the dark, his hard, drawn face smoothening, his eyelids lowering a little like the eyelids of a happy, sleeping person. This moment was a return and a beginning. He stretched out his hand, took care to draw his breath lightly twice, and opened the door.
    By a table in a little, faintly lit room a red-haired man was counting his money.
    The sudden entrance of a stranger did not seem to surprise the host of the room, he looked up casually and then sank back into his former occupation. But his guest felt the moment to be formidable.
    The man by the table was ugly, and had nothing kindabout him. Yet in the fact that even while counting his money he left his door unlocked, to be entered by a stranger, there was a kind of friendliness which might hold great possibilities. But what am I to say to him? Angelo thought.
    After a while he said, “I cannot sleep.”
    The red-haired man waited a moment, then he looked up. “I never sleep,” he declared with extreme arrogance.
    After this short interruption he resumed his work. He carefully arranged his coins in piles of two, scattered them with his big hands and re-collected them in piles of five—to scatter these once more, and build up, absorbed in the task, new piles of six, of ten and fifteen, and at last of three. In the end he stopped, and without taking his hands off the silver leaned back in the chair. He gazed straight before him and repeated, with deep scorn, “I never sleep.
    “Only dolts and drudges sleep,” he took up his theme after a while. “Fishermen, peasants and artisans must have their hours of snoring at any cost. Their heavy natures cry out for sleep even in the greatest hour of life. Drowsiness settles on their eyelids. Divine agony sweats blood at a stone’s throw, but they cannot keep awake, and the whizzing of an angel’s wings will not wake them up. Those living dead will never know what happened, or what was said, while they themselves lay huddled and gaping. I alone know. For I never sleep.”
    Suddenly he turned in his chair toward his guest. “He said so Himself,” he remarked, “and had He not been so hard driven, with what high disdain would He not have spoken! Now it was a moan, like the sea breaking against the shore for the very last time before doomsday. He Himself told them so, the fools: ‘What, could ye not watch with me one hour?’ ”
    For a minute he looked Angelo straight in the face.
    “But no one,” he concluded slowly, in indescribable pride, “no one in the world could ever seriously believe that I myself did sleep—on that Thursday night in the garden.”

OF HIDDEN THOUGHTS
AND OF HEAVEN
    I t was a lovely spring day, and the almond trees were blossoming, delicately pink and coral like flamingo feathers, down the slope in front of the white villa. From the terrace at the top there was a wide view over the landscape, and all shapes and colors within it—the far-off, air-blue mountains, the greenish-gray olive groves on the nearer slopes; the serpentine, dust-gray road through the valley below; the free, fleeting groups of big clouds; and the noble, mathematically straight, darker blue line of the sea on the horizon—in the cool of the evening