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Yes, a party for losing jobs and visas. Games too. My favorite is who will be the first one to dunk his head the longest in sunk drunkenness. And yet I am also partial to another game: which of life's losers will join the high ranks of the monks for a bite to eat and which ones will marry their sisters."

The British passport office facilitated my struggles. For I am a well-known struggler there and am now excused the preliminary heats. I spent a week getting visas in London. I remembered his Excellency of Greece had changed his address.

As a temporary measure the officers issuing visas to immigrants have been, in pursuance of the law, instructed to refuse visas to applicants likely to fall into this class. As a result the visas issued have decreased from an average of about 24,000 per month prior to restrictions to a rate of about 7,000 during the last month. These are largely preferred persons under the law.

The immigration officers had put him through an inquisition suited to potential terrorist cells all because of his tourist visas at Vientiane and Kuala Lumpur prior to his arrival in South Korea. His treatment had not exactly been a welcome home placard; and of course having lost his residency card, that laminated summation of himself, had not helped.

As far as Metcovich we were in Austrian territory, but there we fell into the Asiatic order of things, meeting a frontier guard of ragged Turkish regulars, to whom the visas on our passports seemed of small account, in view of their evident desire to regard us as enemies; and all along the road to Mostar we had the scowling faces of the native Mussulmans bent on us as we passed, and the few Christians we saw wore an air of harelike timidity.

The number of visas granted is now being cut down to a three per cent of previous emigration basis. An interesting diversion from politics was provided by a visit to the Polish Theatre, where Shakespeare's "Kuplec Wenecki" was being performed. The main interest was naturally in Shylock. The Polish actors made very attractive Italian signors.

I spent about ten pounds in London merely for the application of rubber stamps and Consuls' signatures. In the course of my travels that passport became an appalling wilderness of visas and remarks climbing out of their legitimate spaces to get mixed up with wife's signature and the colour of the hair.

I am one of the first to present my passport, which bears the visas of the consul at Tiflis and the Russian authorities at Uzun-Ada. The functionary looks at it attentively. When you are dealing with a mandarin, you should always be on the lookout. Nevertheless, the examination raises no difficulty, and the seal of the green dragon declares me all in order.

It did not set Cecil thinking, however, after Browning's fashion, because, in the first place, it was a canon with him never to think at all; in the second, if put to it he would have averred that he knew nothing of Venice, except that it was a musty old bore of a place, where they worried you about visas and luggage and all that, chloride of lim'd you if you came from the East, and couldn't give you a mount if it were ever so; and, in the third, instead of longing for the dear dead women, he was entirely contented with the lovely living ones who were at that moment puffing the smoke of his scented cigarettes into his eyes, making him eat lobster drowned in Chablis, or pelting him with bonbons.

What a round of packing and buying; what a filling out of forms and a stamping of visas; what an orgy of injections and inoculations and preventive therapy! Merely getting ready for the trip made my pulse race faster and my adrenalin balance rise to the very point of paranoia; it was like being given a true blue new chance to live. At last I was ready.