"To Lucien, feasting his eyes by stealth on the diamonds and counting the days to his relief, the stones meant that Jeanne and happiness were now close within his grasp. There would be difficulty, to be sure, in disposing of them; but with Jeanne's advice—she had a practical mind—and perhaps with Jeanne's help, the way would not be hard to find. He was inclined to plume himself on the ease with which, so far, it had been managed. His leaving the rings, and the gems sewn within the camisole—though to be sure these were not discovered for many hours—had been a masterstroke. He and his comrades had been complimented together upon their honesty.

"The relief came duly; and in this frame of mind—a little sly, but more than three parts triumphant—he returned to Ile Lezan and was made welcome as something of a hero. (To do him credit, he had worked hard in recovering the bodies from the wreck.) At all times it is good to arrive home after a spell on the lighthouse. The smell of nets drying and of flowers in the gardens, the faces on the quay, and the handshakes, and the first church-going—they all count. But to Lucien these things were for once as little compared with the secret he carried. His marriage now was assured, and that first evening—the Eve of Noel—he walked with Jeanne up the road to the cottage, and facing it, told her his secret. They could be married now. He promised it, and indicated the house with a wave of the hand almost proprietary.

"But Jeanne looked at him as one scared, and said: 'Shall I marry a thief?'

"Then, very quietly, she asked for a look at the jewels, and he handed them to her. She had never set eyes on diamonds before, but all women have an instinct for jewels, and these made her gasp. 'Yes,' she owned, 'I could not have believed that the world contained such beautiful things. I am sorry thou hast done this wickedness, but I understand how they tempted thee.'

"'What is this you are chanting?' demanded Lucien. 'The stones were nothing to me. I thought only that by selling them we two could set up house as man and wife.'

"'My dear one,' said Jeanne, 'what happiness could we have known with this between us?' What with the diamonds in her hand and the little cottage there facing her, so long desired, she was forced to shut her eyes for a moment; but when she opened them again her voice was quite firm. 'We must restore them where they belong. It may be that Pere Thomas can help us; but I must think of a way. Give them to me, and let me keep them while I think of a way.'

"'You do not love me as I love you,' said Lucien in his anger and disappointment; but he knew, all the same, that he spoke an untruth.

"Jeanne took the diamonds home with her, to her bedroom, and sat for some time on the edge of her bed, thinking out a way. In the midst of her thinking she stood up, walked over to the glass, and clasped the finest of the necklaces about her throat. . . . I suppose no woman of this country ever wore the like of it—no, not in the days when there were kings and queens of Leon. . . . Jeanne was not beautiful, but she gazed at herself with eyes like those of a patient in a fever. . . . Then of a sudden she felt the stones burning her as though they had been red-hot coals. She plucked them off, and cast herself on her knees beside the bed."

"You will remember that this was the Eve of Noel, when the children of the parish help me to deck the creche for the infant Christ. We take down the images—see, there is St. Joseph, and there yonder Our Lady, in the side chapel; the two oxen and a sheep are put away in the vestry, in a cupboard full of camphor. We have the Three Kings too. . . . In short, we put our hearts into the dressing-up. By nightfall all is completed, and I turn the children out, reserving some few last touches which I invent to surprise them when they come again on Christmas morning. Afterwards I celebrate the Mass for the Vigil, and then always I follow what has been a custom in this parish, I believe, ever since the church was built. I blow out all the candles but two, and remain here, seated, until the day breaks, and the folk assemble to celebrate the first Mass of Noel. Eh? It is discipline, but I bring rugs, and I will not say that all the time my eyes are wide open.

"Certainly I closed them on this night of which I am telling. For I woke up with a start, and almost, you might say, in trepidation, for it seemed to me that someone was moving in the church. My first thought was that some mischievous child had crept in, and was playing pranks with my creche, and to that first I made my way. Beyond the window above it rode the flying moon, and in the rays of it what did I see?

"The figures stood as I had left them. But above the manger, over the shoulders of the Virgin, blazed a rope of light—of diamonds such as I have never seen nor shall see again—all flashing green and blue and fieriest scarlet and piercing white. Of the Three Kings, also each bore a gift, two of them a necklace apiece, and the third a ring. I stood before the miracle, and my tongue clave to the roof of my mouth, and then a figure crept out of the shadows and knelt in the pool of moonlight at my feet. It was Jeanne. She caught at the skirt of my soutane, and broke into sobbing.

"'My father, let the Blessed One wear them ever, or else help me to give them back!'

"You will now guess, monsieur, on what business I have been visiting England. It is a great country. The old clergyman sat among his azaleas and rhododendrons and listened to all my story. Then he took the box that held his daughter's jewels, and, emptying it upon the table, chose out one necklace and set it aside. 'This one,' said he, 'shall be sold, my friend, and with the money you shall, after giving this girl a marriage portion, re-adorn your church on Ile Lezan to the greater glory of God!'"

On our way back to his lodging the little Cure halted me before the cottage. Gay curtains hung in the windows, and the veranda had been freshly painted.

"At the end of the month Lucien gets his relief, and then they are to be married," said the little Cure.



THE WREN.

A LEGEND.

Early on St. Stephen's Day—which is the day after Christmas—young John Cara, son of old John Cara, the smith of Porthennis, took down his gun and went forth to kill small birds. He was not a sportsman; it hurt him to kill any living creature. But all the young men in the parish went slaughtering birds on St. Stephen's Day; and the Parson allowed there was warrant for it, because, when St. Stephen had almost escaped from prison, a small bird (by tradition a wren) had chirped, and awakened his gaolers.

Strange to say, John Cara's dislike of gunning went with a singular aptitude for it. He had a quick sense with birds; could guess their next movements just as though he read their minds; and rarely missed his aim if he took it without giving himself time to think.

Now the rest of youths, that day, chose the valley bottoms as a matter of course, and trooped about in parties, with much whacking of bushes. But John went up to Balmain—which is a high stony moor overlooking the sea—because he preferred to be alone, and also because, having studied their ways, he knew this to be the favourite winter haunt of the small birds, especially of the wrens and the titlarks.

His mother had set her heart on making a large wranny-pie (that is, wren-pie, but actually it includes all manner of birdlings). It was to be the largest in the parish. She was vain of young John's prowess, and would quote it when old John grumbled that the lad was slow as a smith. "And yet," said old John, "backward isn't the word so much as foolish. Up to a point he understands iron 'most so well as I understand it myself. Then some notion takes him, and my back's no sooner turned than he spoils his job. Always trying to make iron do what iron won't do—that's how you may put it." The wife, who was a silly woman, and (like many another such) looked down on her husband's trade, maintained that her boy ought to have been born a squire, with game of his own.

Young John went up to Balmain; and there, sure enough, he found wrens and titlarks flitting about everywhere, cheeping amid the furze-bushes on the low stone hedges and the granite boulders, where the winter rains had hollowed out little basins for themselves, little by little, working patiently for hundreds of years. The weather was cold, but still and sunny. As he climbed, the sea at first made a blue strip beyond the cliff's edge on his right, then spread into a wide blue floor, three hundred feet below him, and all the width of it twinkling. Ahead and on his left all the moorland twinkled too, with the comings and goings of the birds. The wrens mostly went about their business—whatever that might be—in a sharp, practical way, keeping silence; but the frail note of the titlarks sounded here, there, everywhere.

Young John might have shot scores of them. But, as he headed for the old mine-house of Balmain and the cromlech, or Main-Stone, which stands close beside it—and these are the only landmarks—he did not even trouble to charge his gun. For the miracle was happening already.

It began—as perhaps most miracles do—very slowly and gently, without his perceiving it; quite trivially, too, and even absurdly. It started within him, upon a thought that wren-pie was a foolish dish after all! His mother, who prided herself upon making it, did but pretend to enjoy it after it was cooked. His father did not even pretend: the mass of little bones in it cheated his appetite and spoiled his temper. From this, young John went on to consider. "Was it worth while to go on killing wrens and shamming an appetite for them, only because a wren had once informed against St. Stephen? How were these wrens guilty? And, anyway, how were the titlarks guilty?" Young John reasoned it out in this simple fashion. He came to the Main-Stone, and seating himself on the turf, leaned his back against one of the blocks which support the huge monolith. He sat there for a long while, puckering his brows, his gun idle beside him. At last he said to himself, but firmly and aloud:

"Parson and the rest say 'tis true. But I can't believe it, and something inside says 'tis wrong. . . . There! I won't shoot another bird—and that settles it!"

"Halleluia!" said a tiny voice somewhere above him.

The voice, though' tiny, was shrill and positive. Young John recognised, and yet did not recognise it. He stared up at the wall of the old mine-house from which it had seemed to speak, but he could see no one. Next he thought that the word must have come from his own heart, answering a sudden gush of warmth and happiness that set his whole body glowing. It was as if winter had changed to summer, within him and without, and all in a moment. He blinked in the stronger sunshine, and felt it warm upon his eyelids.

"Halleluia!" said the voice again. It certainly came from the wall. He looked again, and, scanning it in this strange, new light, was aware of a wren in one of the crevices.

"Will he? will he?" piped another voice, pretty close behind his ear. Young John, now he had learnt that wrens can talk, had no difficulty in recognising this other voice: it was the half-hearted note of the titlark. He turned over on his side and peered into the shadow of the Main-Stone; but in vain, for the titlark is a hesitating, unhappy little soul that never quite dares to make up its mind. It used to be the friend of a race that inhabited Cornwall ages ago. It builds in their cromlechs, and its song remembers them. It is the bird, too, in whose nest the cuckoo lays; so it knows all about losing one's children and being dispossessed.

"We will give him a gift," chirruped the wren, "and send him about his business. He is the first man that has the sense to leave us to ours."

"But will he?—will he?" the titlark piped back ghostlily. "One can never be sure. I have known men long, long before ever you came here. I knew King Arthur. This rock was his table, and he dined here with seven other kings on the night after they had beaten the Danes at Vellandruchar. I hid under the stone and listened to them passing the cups, and between their talk you could hear the stream running down the valley—it turned the two mill-wheels, Vellandruchar and Vellandreath, with blood that night. Even at daybreak it ran high over the legs of the choughs walking on the beach below—that is why the choughs go red-legged to this day. . . . They are few now, but then they were many: and next spring they came and built in the rigging of the Danes' ships, left ashore—for not a Dane had escaped. But King Arthur had gone his way. Ah, he was a man!"

"Nevertheless," struck in the wren, "this is a good fellow too; and a smith, whose trade is as old as your King Arthur's. We will prosper him in it."

"What will you give him?" asked the titlark.

"He is lying at this moment on the trefoil that commands all metals. Let him look to his gun when he awakes."

"Ah!" said the titlark, "I told you that secret. I was with Teague the Smith when he discovered it. . . . But he discovered it too late; and, besides, he was a dreamer, and used it only to make crosses and charms and womanish ornaments."

"It's no use to us, anyhow," said the practical wren. "So let us give it away. I hate waste."

"I doubt," said the titlark, "it will be much profit to him, wonderful though it is."

"Well," said the wren, "a present's a present. Folks with a living to get must give what they can afford."

It is not wise, as a rule, to sleep on the bare ground in December. But Young John awoke warm and jolly as a sandboy. He picked up his gun. It was bent and curiously twisted in the barrel. "Hallo!" said he, and peered closely into the short turf where it had lain. . . .

When he reached home his mother cried out joyfully, seeing his game-bag and how it bulged. She cried out to a different tune when he showed her what it contained—clods and clumps of turf, matted over with a tiny close-growing plant that might have been any common moss for aught she knew (or recked) of the difference.

"But where are all the birds you promised me?"

He held out his gun—he had promised no birds, but that mattered nothing. His father took it to the lamp and glanced at it; put on his horn spectacles slowly, and peered at it. He was silent for a long while. Young John had turned inattentively from his mother's reproaches, and stood watching him.

The old man swung about at length. "When did ye contrive this?" he asked, rubbing the twist of the gun-barrel with his thumb. "And the forge not heated all this day!"

"We'll heat it to-night after supper," said Young John.

In the Church of Porthennis, up to twenty-five years ago, there stood a screen of ironwork—a marvel of arabesques and intricate traceries, with baskets of flowers, sea-monsters, Cherubim, tying the filigree-work and looping it together in knots and centres. One panel had for subject a spider midmost in a web, to visit which smiths came hundreds of miles, from all over the country, and wondered. For it was impossible to guess how iron had ever been beaten to such thinness or drawn so ductile. But unhappily-and priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die with him—the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song. His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art. It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church—or, as we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it—he swept the remnants away. But the legend survives, ferro perennius.



NOT HERE, O APPOLLO!

A CHRISTMAS STORY HEARD AT MIDSUMMER.

We sat and talked in the Vicarage garden overlooking Mount's Bay. The long summer day lingered out its departure, although the full moon was up and already touching with a faint radiance the towers on St. Michael's Mount—'the guarded Mount'—that rested as though at anchor in the silver-grey offing. The land-breeze had died down with sunset; the Atlantic lay smooth as a lake below us, and melted, league upon league, without horizon into the grey of night. Between the Vicar's fuchsia-bushes we looked down on it, we three— the Vicar, the Senior Tutor and I.

I think the twilit hour exactly accorded with our mood, and it did not need the scent of the Vicar's ten-week stocks, wafted across the garden, to touch a nerve of memory. For it was twenty years since we had last sat in this place and talked, and the summer night seemed to be laden with tranquil thoughts, with friendship and old regard. . . . Twenty years ago I had been an undergraduate, and had made one of a reading-party under the Senior Tutor, who annually in the Long Vacation brought down two or three fourth-year men to bathe and boat and read Plato with him, for no pay but their friendship: and, generation after generation, we young men had been made welcome in this garden by the Vicar, who happened to be an old member of our College and (as in time I came to see) delighted to renew his youth in ours. There had been daughters, too, in the old days. . . . But they had married, and the Vicarage nest was empty long since.

The Senior Tutor, too, had given up work and retired upon his Fellowship. But every summer found him back at his old haunts; and still every summer brought a reading-party to the Cove, in conduct now of a brisk Junior Fellow, who had read with me in our time and achieved a "first." In short, things at the Cove were pretty much the same after twenty years, barring that a small colony of painters had descended upon it and made it their home. With them the undergraduates had naturally and quickly made friends, and the result was a cricket match—a grand Two-days' Cricket Match. They were all extremely serious about it, and the Oxford party—at their wits' end, no doubt, to make up a team against the Artists—had bethought themselves of me, who dwelt at the other end of the Duchy. They had written—they had even sent a two-page telegram—to me, who had not handled a bat for more years than I cared to count. It is delicious to be flattered by youth, especially for gifts you never possessed or possess no longer. I yielded and came. The season was Midsummer, or a little after; the weather golden and glorious.

We had drawn stumps after the first day's play, and the evening was to be wound up with a sing-song in the great tent erected—a marvel to the "Covers," or native fishermen—on the cricket-field. But I no longer take kindly to such entertainments; and so, after a bathe and a quiet dinner at the inn, it came into my mind to take a stroll up the hill and along the cliffs, and pay an evening call on the old Vicar, wondering if he would remember me.

I found him in his garden. The Senior Tutor was there too—"the grave man, nicknamed Adam"—and the Vicar's wife, seated in a bee-hive straw chair, knitting. So we four talked happily for a while, until she left us on pretence that the dew was falling; and with that, as I have said, a wonderful silence possessed the garden fragrant with memories and the night-scent of flowers. . .

Then I let fall the word that led to the Vicar's story. In old rambles, after long mornings spent with Plato, my eyes (by mirage, no doubt) had always found something Greek in the curves and colour of this coast; or rather, had felt the want of it. What that something was I could hardly have defined: but the feeling was always with me. It was as if at each bend of the shore I expected to find a temple with pillars, or a column crowning the next promontory; or, where the coast-track wound down to the little haven, to happen on a votive tablet erected to Poseidon or to "Helen's brothers, lucent stars"; nay, to meet with Odysseus' fisherman carrying an oar on his shoulder, or even, in an amphitheatre of the cliffs, to surprise Apollo himself and the Nine seated on a green plat whence a waterfall gushed down the coombe to the sandy beach . . . . This evening on my way along the cliffs—perhaps because I had spent a day bathing in sunshine in the company of white-flannelled youths—the old sensation had returned to haunt me. I spoke of it.

"'Not here, O Apollo—'" murmured the Senior Tutor.

"You quote against your own scepticism," said I. "The coast is right enough; it is"

Where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea.

"It was made to invite the authentic gods—only the gods never found it out."

"Did they not?" asked the Vicar quietly. The question took us a little aback, and after a pause his next words administered another small shock. "One never knows," he said, "when, or how near, the gods have passed. One may be listening to us in this garden, to-night. . . . As for the Greeks—"

"Yes, yes, we were talking of the Greeks," the Senior Tutor (a convinced agnostic) put in hastily. "If we leave out Pytheas, no Greeks ever visited Cornwall. They are as mythical hereabouts as"— he hesitated, seeking a comparison—"as the Cornish wreckers; and they never existed outside of pious story-books."

Said the Vicar, rising from his garden-chair, "I accept the omen. Wait a moment, you two." He left us and went across the dim lawn to the house, whence by and by he returned bearing a book under his arm, and in his hand a candle, which he set down unlit upon the wicker table among the coffee-cups.

"I am going," he said, "to tell you something which, a few years ago, I should have scrupled to tell. With all deference to your opinions, my dear Dick, I doubt if they quite allow you to understand the clergy's horror of chancing a heresy; indeed, I doubt if either of you quite guess what a bridle a man comes to wear who preaches a hundred sermons or so every year to a rural parish, knowing that nine-tenths of his discourse will assuredly be lost, while at any point in the whole of it he may be fatally misunderstood. . . . Yet as a man nears his end he feels an increasing desire to be honest, neither professing more than he knows, nor hiding any small article of knowledge as inexpedient to the Faith. The Faith, he begins to see, can take care of itself: for him, it is important to await his marching-orders with a clean breast. Eh, Dick?"

The Senior Tutor took his pipe from his mouth and nodded slowly.

"But what is your book?" he asked.

"My Parish Register. Its entries cover the years from 1660 to 1827. Luckily I had borrowed it from the vestry box, and it was safe on my shelf in the Vicarage on the Christmas Eve of 1870, the night when the church took fire. That was in my second year as incumbent, and before ever you knew these parts."

"By six months," said the Senior Tutor. "I first visited the Cove in July, 1871, and you were then beginning to clear the ruins. All the village talk still ran on the fire, with speculations on the cause of it."

"The cause," said the Vicar, "will never be known. I may say that pretty confidently, having spent more time in guessing than will ever be spent by another man. . . . But since you never saw the old church as it stood, you never saw the Heathen Lovers in the south aisle."

"Who were they?"

"They were a group of statuary, and a very strange one; executed, as I first believed, in some kind of wax—but, pushing my researches (for the thing interested me) I found the material to be a white soapstone that crops out here and there in the crevices of our serpentine. Indeed, I know to a foot the spot from which the sculptor took it, close on two hundred years ago."

"It was of no great age, then?"

"No: and yet it bore all the marks of an immense age. For to begin with, it had stood five-and-twenty years in this very garden, exposed to all weathers, and the steatite (as they call it) is of all substances the most friable—is, in fact, the stuff used by tailors under the name of French chalk. Again, when, in 1719, my predecessor, old Vicar Hichens, removed it to the church and set it in the south aisle—or, at any rate, when he died and ceased to protect it—the young men of the parish took to using it for a hatstand, and also to carving their own and their sweethearts' names upon it during sermon-time. The figures of the sculpture were two; a youth and a maid, recumbent, and naked but for a web of drapery flung across their middles; and they lay on a roughly carved rock, over which the girl's locks as well as the drapery were made to hang limp, as though dripping with water. . . . One thing more I must tell you, risking derision; that to my ignorance the sculpture proclaimed its age less by these signs of weather and rough usage than by the simplicity of its design, its proportions, the chastity (there's no other word) of the two figures. They were classical, my dear Dick— what was left of them; Greek, and of the best period."

The Senior Tutor lit a fresh pipe, and by the flare of the match I saw his eyes twinkling.

"Praxiteles," he jerked out, between the puffs, "and in the age of Kneller! But proceed, my friend."

"And do you wait, my scoffer!" The Vicar borrowed the box of matches, lit the candle—which held a steady flame in the still evening air—opened the book, and laid it on his knee while he adjusted his spectacles. "The story is here, entered on a separate leaf of the Register and signed by Vicar Hichens' own hand. With your leave—for it is brief—I am going to read it through to you. The entry is headed:"

'Concerning a group of Statuary now in the S. aisle of Lezardew Parish Church: set there by me in witness of God's Providence in operation, as of the corruption of man's heart, and for a warning to sinners to amend their ways.

'In the year 1694, being the first of my vicariate, there lived in this Parish as hind to the farmer of Vellancoose a young man exceeding comely and tall of stature, of whom (when I came to ask) the people could tell me only that his name was Luke, and that as a child he had been cast ashore from a foreign ship; they said, a Portugal ship. [But the Portugals have swart complexions and are less than ordinary tall, whereas this youth was light-coloured and only brown by sunburn.] Nor could he tell me anything when I questioned him concerning his haveage; which I did upon report that he was courting my housemaiden Grace Pascoe, an honest good girl, whom I was loth to see waste herself upon an unworthy husband. Upon inquiry I could not discover this Luke to be any way unworthy, saving that he was a nameless man and a foreigner and a backward church-goer. He told me with much simplicity that he could not remember to have had any parents; that Farmer Lowry had brought him up from the time he was shipwrecked and ever treated him kindly; and that, as for church-going, he had thought little about it, but would amend in this matter if it would give me pleasure. Which I thought a strange answer. When I went on to hint at his inclination for Grace Pascoe, he confused me by asking, with a look very straight and good-natured, if the girl had ever spoken to me on the matter; to which I was forced to answer that she had not. So he smiled, and I could not further press him.

'Yet in my mind they would have made a good match; for the girl too was passing well-featured, and this Luke had notable gifts. He could read and write. The farmer spoke well of him, saying, "He has rewarded me many times over. Since his coming, thanks to the Lord, my farm prospers: and in particular he has a wonderful way with the beasts. Cattle or sheep, fowls, dogs, the wild things even, come to him almost without a call." He had also (the farmer told me) a wonderful knack of taking clay or mud and moulding it with his hands to the likeness of living creatures, of all sorts and sizes. In the kitchen by the great fire he would work at these images by hours together, to the marvel of everyone: but when the image was made, after a little while he always destroyed it; nor was it ever begged by anyone for a gift, there being a belief that, being fashioned by more than a man's skill, such things could only bring ill-luck to the possessors of them.

'For months then I heard no more of Grace Pascoe's lover: nor (though he now came every Sunday to church) did I ever see looks pass between the Vicarage pew (where she sat) and the Vellancoose pew (where he). But at the end of the year she came to me and told me she had given her word to a young farmer of Goldsithney, John Magor by name. In a worldly way this was a far better match for her than to take a nameless and landless man. Nor knew I anything against John Magor beyond some stray wildness natural to youth. He came of clean blood. He was handsome, almost as the other; tall, broad of chest, a prizewinner at wrestling-matches; and of an age when a good wife is usually a man's salvation.

'I called their banns, and in due time married them. On the wedding-day, after the ceremony, I returned from church to find the young man Luke awaiting me by my house-door; who very civilly desired me to walk over to Vellancoose with him, which I did. There, taking me aside to an unused linhay, he showed me the sculpture, telling me (who could not conceal my admiration) that he had meant it for John and Grace Magor (as she now was) for a wedding-gift, but that the young woman had cried out against it as immodest and, besides, unlucky. On the first count I could understand her rejecting such a gift; for the folk of these parts know nothing of statuary and count all nakedness immodest. Indeed, I wondered that the bridegroom had not taken Luke's freedom in ill part, and I said so: to which he answered, smiling, that no man ever quarrelled with him or could quarrel. "And now, sir," he went on, "my apprenticeship is up, and I am going on a long journey. Since you find my group pleasing I would beg you to accept it, or—if you had liefer—to keep it for me until I come again, as some day I shall." "I do not wonder," said I, "at your wish to leave Lezardew Parish for the world where, as I augur, great fortune awaits you." He smiled again at this and said that, touching his future, he had neither any hope nor any fear: and again he pressed me to accept the statuary. For a time I demurred, and in the end made it a condition that he altered the faces somewhat, concealing the likeness to John and Grace Magor: and to this he consented. "Yet," said he, "it will be the truer likeness when the time comes."

'He was gone on the morrow by daybreak, and late that afternoon the farmer brought me the statuary in his hay-wagon. I had it set in the garden by the great filberd-tree, and there it has stood for near five-and-twenty years. (I ought to say that he had kept his promise of altering the faces, and thereby to my thinking had defaced their beauty: but beneath this defacement I still traced their first likeness.)

'Now to speak of the originals. My way lying seldom by Goldsithney, I saw little of John and Grace Magor during the next few years, and nothing at all of them after they had left Goldsithney (their fortunes not prospering) and rented a smaller farm on the coast southward, below Rosudgeon: but what news came to me was ever of the same tenour. Their marriage had brought neither children nor other blessings. There were frequent quarrels, and the man had yielded to drinking; the woman, too, it was reported. She, that had been so trim a serving-maid, was become a slut with a foul tongue. They were cruelly poor with it all; for money does not always stick to unclean hands. I write all this to my reproach as well as to theirs, for albeit they dwelt in another parish it had been my Christian duty to seek them out. I did not, and I was greatly to blame.

'To pass over many years and come to the 2nd of December last (1718). That night, about 11 o'clock, I sat in my library reading. It was blowing hard without, the wind W.N.W.; but I had forgotten the gale in my book, when a sound, as it were a distant outcry of many voices, fetched me to unbar the shutters and open the window to listen. The sound, whatever it was, had died away: I heard but the wind roaring and the surf on the beaches along the Bay: and I was closing the window again when, close at hand, a man's voice called to me to open the front door. I went out to the hall, where a lamp stood, and opened to him. The light showed me the young man Luke, on whom I had not set eyes for these four-and-twenty years: nor, amazed and perturbed as I was, did it occur to me as marvellous that he had not aged a day. "There is a wreck," said he, "in the Porth below here; and you, sir, are concerned in it. Will you fetch a lantern and come with me?" He put this as a question, but in his tone was a command: and when I brought the lantern he took it from me and led the way. We struck across the Home Parc southward, thence across Gew Down and the Leazes, and I knew that he was making for the track which leads down to the sea by Prah Sands. At the entry of the track he took off his coat and wrapped the lantern in it, though just there its light would have been most useful, or so I thought. But he led the way easily, and I followed with scarce a stumble. "We shall not need it," he said; "for see, there they are!" pointing to a small light that moved on the sands below us. "But who are they?" I asked. He strode down ahead of me, making swiftly for the light, and coming upon them in the noise of the gale we surprised a man and a woman, who at first cowered before us and then would have cast down their light and run. But my companion, unwrapping the lantern, held it high and so that the light shone on their faces. They were John Magor and his wife Grace.

'Then I, remembering what cry of shipwrecked souls had reached to my library in the Vicarage, and well guessing what work these wretches had been at, lifted my voice to accuse them. But the young man Luke stepped between us, and said he to them gently, "Come, and I will show what you seek." He went before us for maybe two hundred yards to the northern end of the beach, they behind him quaking, and I shepherding them in my righteous wrath. "Behold you," said he, and again lifted the lantern over a rock dark with seaweed (and yet the weed shone in the light)—"Behold you, what you have wrecked."

'On their backs along the flat of the rock lay two naked bodies, of a youth and a maid, half-clasped one to another. He handed me the lantern for a better look, and in the rays of it the two wretches peered forward as if drawn against their will. I cannot well say if they or I first perceived the miracle; that these corpses, as they lay in the posture, so bore the very likeness of the two lovers on my sculptured slab. But I remember that, as John and Grace Magor screamed back and clung to me, and as by the commotion of them clutching at my knees the lantern fell and was extinguished, I heard the young man Luke say, "Yourselves, yourselves!"

'I called to him to pick up the lantern; but he did not answer, and the two clinging wretches encumbered me. After a long while the clouds broke and the moon shone through them; and where he had stood there was no one. Also the slab of rock was dark, and the two drowned corpses had vanished with him. I pointed to it; but there was no tinder-box at hand to light the lantern again, and in the bitter weather until the dawn the two clung about me, confessing and rehearsing their sins.

'I have great hopes that they are brought to a better way of life; and because (repent they never so much) no one is any longer likely to recognise in these penitents the originals upon whom it was moulded these many years ago, I am determined to move the statuary to a place in the S. aisle of our parish church, as a memorial, the moral whereof I have leave of John and Grace Magor to declare to all the parish. I choose to defer making it public, in tenderness, while they live: for all things point as yet to the permanent saving of their souls. But, as in the course of nature I shall predecease them, I set the record here in the Parish Register, as its best place.

'(Signed) Malachi Hichens, B.D. '21st Jan., 1719.'

"And is that all?" I asked.

"Yes and no," said the Vicar, closing the book. "It is all that Mr. Hichens has left to help us: and you may or may not connect with it what I am going to relate of my own experience. . . . The old church, as you know, was destroyed by fire in the morning hours of Christmas Day, 1870. Throughout Christmas Eve and for a great part of the night it had been snowing, but the day broke brilliantly, on a sky without wind or cloud; and never have my eyes seen anything so terribly beautiful—ay, so sublime—as the sight which met them at the lych-gate. The old spire—which served as a sea-mark for the fishermen, and was kept regularly white-washed that it might be the more conspicuous—glittered in the morning sunshine from base to summit, as though matching its whiteness against that of the snow-laden elms: and in this frame of pure silver-work, burning without noise and with scarcely any smoke—this by reason of the excessive dryness of the woodwork—the church stood one glowing vault of fire. There was indeed so little smoke that at the first alarm, looking from my bedroom window, I had been incredulous; and still I wondered rather than believed, staring into this furnace wherein every pillar, nook, seat or text on the wall was distinctly visible, the south windows being burnt out and the great door thrown open and on fire.

"There was no entrance possible here, or indeed anywhere: but, being half-distraught, I ran around to the small door of the north aisle. This, too, was on fire—or, rather, was already consumed; and you will say that I must have been wholly distraught when I tell you what I saw, looking in through the aperture through which it would have been death to pass. I saw him."

"You saw the young man Luke?" I asked, as he paused, inviting a word.

"He was standing by the stone figures within the porch. . . . And they crumbled—crumbled before my eyes in the awful heat. But he stood scatheless. He was young and comely; the hair of his head was not singed. He was as one of the three that walked in the midst of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace. . . . When the stone slab was crumbled to a handful of dust, he moved up the aisle and was gone. . . . That is all: but, as you accept your friend for a truthful man, explain, O sceptic!"

—And again there fell a silence in the garden.



FIAT JUSTITIA RUAT SOLUM.

In the days of my childhood, and up to the year 1886, the Justices of the Peace for the Gantick Division of Hundred of Powder, in the county of Cornwall, held their Petty Sessions at Scawns, a bleak, foursquare building set on the knap of a windy hill, close beside the high road that leads up from the sea to the market town of Tregarrick. The house, when the county in Quarter Sessions purchased it to convert it into a police station and petty sessional court, had been derelict for twenty years—that is to say, ever since the winter of 1827, when Squire Nicholas, the last owner to reside in it (himself an ornament in his time of the Gantick Bench), broke his neck in the hunting field. With his death, the property passed to some distant cousin in the North, who seldom visited Cornwall. This cousin leased the Scawns acres to a farmer alongside of whose fields they marched, and the farmer, having no use for the mansion, gladly sub-let it. The county authorities, having acquired the lease, did indeed make certain structural adaptations, providing tolerable quarters for the local constabulary, with a lockup in the cellarage (which was commodious), but apart from this did little to arrest the general decay of the building. In particular, the disrepair of the old dining-room, where the magistrates now held Session, had become a public scandal. The old wall-paper dropped in tatters, the ceiling showed patches where the plaster had broken from the battens, rats had eaten holes in the green baize table-cloth, and the whole place smelt of dry-rot. From the wall behind the magistrates' table, in the place where nations more superstitious than ours suspend a crucifix, an atrocious portrait of the late Squire Nicholas surveyed the desolated scene of his former carousals. An inscription at the base of the frame commemorated him as one who had consistently "Done Right to all manner of People after the Laws and Usages of the Realm, without Fear or Favour, Affection or Ill-will."

Beneath this portrait, on the second Wednesday in June, 1886, were gathered no fewer than six Justices of the Peace, a number the more astonishing because Petty Sessions chanced to clash with the annual meeting of the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Society, held that year at the neighbouring market town of Tregarrick. Now, the reason of this full bench was at once simple and absurd, and had caused merriment not unmixed with testiness in the magistrates' private room. Each Justice, counting on his neighbour's delinquency, had separately resolved to pay a sacrifice to public duty, and to drop in to dispose of the business of Sessions before proceeding to the Show. The charge-sheet, be it noted, was abnormally light: it comprised one single indictment.

"Good Lord!" growled Admiral Trist, Chairman of the Bench, Master of the famous Gantick Harriers. "Six of us to hear a case of sleeping out!"

"Who's the defendant?" asked Sir Felix Felix-Williams. "'Thomas Edwards'—Don't know the name in these parts."

"I doubt if he knows it himself, Sir Felix," answered Mr. Batty, the Justices' Clerk. "The Inspector tells me it's a tramping fellow the police picked up two nights ago. He has been in lock-up ever since."

"Then why the devil couldn't they have sent round and fished up one of us—or a couple—to deal with the case out of hand?"

"Damned shame, the way the police nurse this business!" murmured Lord Rattley, our somewhat disreputable local peer. "They're wanted at Tregarrick to-day, and, what's more, they want the fun of the Show. So they take excellent care to keep the charge-list light. But since Petty Sessions must be held, whether or no, they pounce on some poor devil of a tramp to put a face on the business."

"H'm, h'm." The Admiral, friend of law and order, dreaded Lord Rattley's tongue, which was irresponsible and incisive. "Well, if this is our only business, gentlemen—"

"There is another case, sir," put in Mr. Batty. "Wife—Trudgian by name—wants separation order. Application reached me too late to be included in the list."

"Trudgian?" queried Parson Voisey. "Not Selina Magor, I hope, that married young Trudgian a year or so back? Husband a clay-labourer, living somewhere outside Tregarrick."

"That's the woman. Young married couple—first quarrel. The wife, on her own admission, had used her tongue pretty sharply, and, I don't doubt, drove the man off to the public-house, where he sat until sulky-drunk. A talking-to by the Chairman, if I might suggest—"

"Yes, yes," agreed Parson Voisey. "And I'll have a word with Selina afterwards. She used to attend my Young Women's Class—one of my most satisfactory girls."

"We'll see—we'll see," said the Admiral. "Are we ready, gentlemen?"

He led the way into Court, where all rose in sign of respect—Mr. Batty's confidential clerk, the Inspector, a solitary constable, a tattered old man in the constable's charge, and the two Trudgians. These last occupied extreme ends of the same form; the husband sullen, with set jaw and eyes obstinately fixed on his boots, the young wife flushed of face and tearful, stealing from time to time a defiant glance at her spouse.

In face of this scanty audience the six Justices solemnly took their seats.

"Thomas Edwards!" called the Clerk.

The tattered old man cringed up to the table, with an embarrassed smile, which yet had a touch of impudence about the corners of the mouth.

"Thomas Edwards, you stand charged for that on a certain date, to wit, June 6th, you, not having any visible means of subsistence, and not giving a good account of yourself, were found lodging in a certain outhouse known as Lobb's Barn, in the Parish of Gantick, contrary, etc. Do you plead Guilty or Not Guilty?"

"Guilty, y'r Worships."

The constable, on a nod from the Inspector, cleared his throat, and stated the charge: "On the 6th instant, y'r Worships, at 10.45 in the evening, being on duty in the neighbourhood of Lobb's Barn," etc. Defendant, on being arrested, had used the filthiest language, and had for some time stoutly resisted being marched off to the lock-up.

"That will do," the Chairman interrupted. "You, Edwards—if that's your real name—"

"It'll do for this job," put in the prisoner.

"Very well. Have you anything to say?"

The prisoner ran his eye along the array of Justices.

"Seems a lot o' dogs for one bone!"

The Admiral stiffened with wrath, and the crimson of his face deepened as Lord Rattley threw himself back in his chair, laughing.

"Forty shillings, or a month!"

"Oh, come—I say!" Lord Rattley murmured.

The Admiral, glancing to right and left, saw, too, that three or four of his colleagues were lifting their eyebrows in polite protest.

"I—I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for not consulting you! Correct me, if you will. I would point out, however, that in addition to the offence with which he is charged, this fellow was guilty of violent and disgusting language, and, further, of resisting the police."

But his colleagues made no further protest, and Thomas Edwards, having but two coppers to his name, was conducted below to the cellarage, there to await transference to the County Jail.

"Selina Trudgian!"

The Admiral, viewing the young couple as they stood sheepishly before him, commanded Selina to state her complaint as briefly as possible, avoiding tears.

But this was beyond her.

"He came home drunk, your Worship," she sobbed, twisting her handkerchief.

"I didn'," corrected her husband.

"He came home d-drunk, your Worship . . . he c-came home d-drunk—"

"Now hearken to me, you two!"

The Admiral, fixing a severe eye on them, started to read them a lesson on married life, with its daily discipline, its constant obligation of mutual forbearance. For a confirmed bachelor, he did it remarkably well; but it must be recorded that this was not by any means his first essay in lecturing discordant spouses from the Bench. Lord Rattley, whose own matrimonial ventures had been (like Mr. Weller's researches in London) extensive and peculiar, leaned back and followed the discourse with appreciation, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, his finger-tips delicately pressed together, his gaze pensively tracking the motions of a bumblebee that had strayed in at an open window and was battering its head against the dusty pane of a closed one.

Just then the Admiral, warming to his theme, pushed back his chair a few inches. . . .

For some days previously a stream of traction-engines had passed along the high road, dragging timber-wagons, tent-wagons, machinery, exhibits of all kinds, towards the Tregarrick Show. This heavy traffic (it was afterwards surmised) had helped what Wordsworth calls "the unimaginable touch of Time," shaking the dry-rotted joists of Scawns House, and preparing the catastrophe.

The Admiral was a heavy-weight. He rode, in those days, at close upon seventeen stone. As he thrust back his chair, there came from the floor beneath—from the wall immediately behind him—an ominous, rending sound. The hind legs of his chair sank slowly, the seat of justice tilted farther and farther; as he clutched wildly at the table, the table began to slide upon him, and with an uproar of cracking timber, table, chairs, magistrates, clerks, together, in one burial blent, were shot downwards into the cellarage.

The Inspector—a tall man—staggering to his feet as the table slid from him into the chasm, leapt and clutched a crazy chandelier that depended above him. His weight tore it bodily from the ceiling, with a torrential downrush of dust and plaster, sweeping him over the edge of the gulf and overwhelming the Trudgians, husband and wife, on the brink of it.

At this moment the constable, fresh from locking up Thomas Edwards below, returned, put his head in at the door, gasped at sight of a devastation which had swallowed up every human being, and with great presence of mind, ran as hard as he could pelt for the hamlet of High Lanes, half a mile away, to summon help.

Now the Inspector, as it happened, was unhurt. Picking himself up, digging his heels into the moraine of plaster, and brushing the grit from his eyes, he had the pleasure of recognising Lord Rattley, the Parson, Mr. Humphry Felix-Williams (son of Sir Felix), and Mr. Batty, as they scrambled forth successively, black with dust but unhurt, save that the Parson had received a slight scalp-wound. Then Mr. Humphry caught sight of a leg clothed in paternal shepherd's-plaid, and tugged at it until Sir Felix was restored, choking, to the light of day—or rather, to the Cimmerian gloom of the cellarage, in which an unexpected figure now confronted them.

It was the prisoner, Thomas Edwards. A collapsing beam had torn away some bricks from the wall of his cell, and he came wriggling through the aperture, using the most dreadful oaths.

"Stir yourselves—Oh,—,—, stir yourselves! Standin' there like a—lot of stuck pigs! Get out the Admiral! The Admiral, I tell you! . . . . Hark to the poor old devil, damnin' away down ther, wi' two hundredweight o' table pressin' against his belly!"

Mr. Edwards, in fact, used an even more vulgar word. But he was not stopping to weigh words. Magistrates, Inspector, Clerk—he took charge of them all on the spot—a master of men. The Admiral, in the unfathomed dark of the cellar, was indeed uttering language to make your hair creep.

"Oh, cuss away, y' old varmint!" sang down Mr. Edwards cheerfully. "The louder you cuss, the better the hearin'; 'means ye have air to breathe an' nothin' broke internal. . . . Eh? Oh, I knows th' old warrior! Opened a gate for en once when he was out hare-huntin', up St. Germans way—I likes a bit o' sport, I do, when I happens on it. Lord love ye, the way he damned my eyes for bein' slow about it! . . . Aye, aye, Admiral! Cuss away, cuss away—proper quarter-deck you're givin' us! But we're gettin' to you fast as we can. . . . England can't spare the likes o' you—an' she won't, not if we can help it!"

The man worked like a demon. What is more, he was making the others work, flailing them all—peer and baronet and parson—with slave-driver's oaths, while they tugged to loosen the timbers under which the magistrates' table lay wedged.

"Lift, I tell ye! Lift! . . . What the—'s wrong with that end o' the beam? Stuck, is it? Jammed? Jammed your grandmothers! Nobbut a few pounds o' loose lime an' plaster beddin' it. Get down on your knees an' clear it. . . . That's better! And now pull! PULL, I say! Oh, not that way, you rabbits!—here, let me show you!"

By efforts Herculean, first digging the rubbish clear with clawed hands, then straining and heaving till their loins had almost cracked, they levered up the table at length, and released not only the Admiral, but the two remaining magistrates, whom they found pinned under its weight, one unharmed, but in a swoon, the other moaning feebly with the pain of two broken ribs.

"Whew! What the devil of a smell of brandy!" observed Lord Rattley, mopping his brow in the intervals of helping to hoist the rescued ones up the moraine. At the top of it, the Inspector, lifting his head above the broken flooring to shout for help, broke into furious profanity; for there, in the empty court-room, stood young Trudgian and his wife, covered, indeed, with white dust, but blissfully wrapt in their own marvellous escape; and young Trudgian for the moment was wholly preoccupied in probing with two fingers for a piece of plaster which had somehow found its way down his Selina's back between the nape of the neck and the bodice.

"Drop it, you fool, and lend a hand!" objurgated the Inspector; whereupon Mrs. Trudgian turned about, bridling.

"You leave my Tom alone, please! A man's first call is on his wedded wife, I reckon."

The rescued magistrates were lifted out, carried forth into fresh air, and laid on the turf by the wayside to recover somewhat while the rescuers again wiped perspiring brows.

"A thimbleful o' brandy might do the Admiral good," suggested the prisoner.

"Brandy?" cried Lord Rattley. "The air reeks of brandy! Where the—?"

"The basement's swimmin' with it, m' lord." The fellow touched his hat. "Two casks stove by the edge o' the table. I felt around the staves, an' counted six others, hale an' tight. Thinks I, 'tis what their Worships will have been keepin' for private use, between whiles. Or elst—"

"Or else?"

"Or else maybe we've tapped a private cellar."

Lord Rattley slapped his thigh.

"A cache, by Jove! Old Squire Nicholas—I remember, as a boy, hearing it whispered he was hand-in-glove with the Free Trade."

The prisoner touched his hat humbly.

"This bein' a magistrates' matter, m' lord, an' me not wishin' to interfere—"

"Quite so." Lord Rattley felt in his pockets. "You have done us a considerable service, my man, and—er—that bein' so—"

"Forty shillin' it was. He's cheap at it"—with a nod towards the Admiral. "A real true-blue old English gentleman! You can always tell by their conversations."

"The fine shall be paid."

"I counted six casks, m'lord, so well as I could by the feel—"

"Yes, yes! And here's a couple of sovereigns for yourself—all I happen to have in my pocket—"

Lord Rattley bustled off to the house for brandy.

"England's old England, hows'ever you strike it!" chirruped the prisoner gleefully, and touched his forehead again. "See you at the Show, m' lord, maybe? 'Will drink your lordship's health there, anyway."

He skipped away up the road towards Tregarrick. In the opposite direction young Mr. and Mrs. Trudgian could be seen just passing out of sight, he supporting her with his arm, pausing every now and then, bending over her uxoriously.



THE HONOUR OF THE SHIP.

I.

"'Erbert 'Enery Bates!"

"Wot cheer!"

It was the morning of Speech-day on board the Industrial Training Ship Egeria—July the 31st, to be precise. At 3 p.m. Sir Felix Felix-Williams, Baronet, would arrive to distribute the prizes. He would be attended by a crowd of ladies and gentlemen; and the speeches, delivered beneath an awning on the upper deck, would be fully reported next day in the local newspapers. The weather was propitious.

Just now (11 a.m.) some half a dozen of the elder boys, attired in dirty white dungaree and barefooted, were engaged in swabbing out what, in her sea-going days, had been the Egeria's ward-room, making ready to set out tables for an afternoon tea to follow the ceremony. They were nominally under supervision of the ship's Schoolmaster, who, however, had gone off to unpack a hamper of flowers—the gift of an enthusiastic subscriber.

"Step this way, 'Erbert 'Enery Bates."

"You go to hell, Link Andrew!" But the boy stopped his work and faced about, nevertheless.

"See this flag?" Link Andrew dived his long arms into a pile of bunting that lay ready for decorating the tea-room. "Wot is it?"

"Union Jack o' course, you silly rotter!"

"Oh, you good, good boy! . . . Yes, dear lads," went on Link Andrew, in a mimicking voice, "it is indeed the meet-your-flag of our 'oly Motherland, and 'Erbert 'Enery Bates, our Good Conduck Medallist, will now oblige by going down on his knees and kissing it. Else I'll put an eye on him!"

Master Bates—"Good Conduct Bates"—stepped forward, with his fists up. He was something of a sneak and a sucker-up, yet by no means a coward. He advanced bravely enough, although he knew that Link Andrew—the best boxer in the ship—was provoking him of set purpose.

The rest of the boys liked Link and disliked Bates; yet their sense of fair play told them that Link was putting himself in the wrong; and yet again, despite their natural eagerness to see a fight, they wanted to save Link from what could but end in folly. He was playing for a fall.

"Here comes Schoolmaster!" shouted one, at a venture.

At that moment, indeed, the Schoolmaster appeared in the doorway.

"What's this noise about?" he demanded. "You, Link Andrew? I thought your interest was to avoid trouble for twenty-four hours."



II.

By the Industrial Schools Act of 1866, 29 & 30 Vict. c. 118, it is ordained that any youngster apparently under the age of fourteen found begging, or wandering destitute, or consorting with thieves, or obstinately playing truant from school, or guilty of being neglected by his parents, or of defying his parents, or of having a parent who has incurred a sentence of penal servitude—may by any two justices be committed to a certified Industrial School, there to be detained until he reaches the age of sixteen, or for a shorter term if the Justices shall so direct. Such an Industrial School was the ex-battleship Egeria.

She had carried seventy-four guns in her time; and though gunless now and jury-masted, was redolent still of the Nelson period from her white-and-gold figure-head to the beautiful stern galleries which Commander Headworthy had adorned with window-boxes of Henry Jacoby geraniums. The Committee in the first flush of funds had spared no pains to reproduce the right atmosphere, and in that atmosphere Commander Headworthy laudably endeavoured to train up his crew of graceless urchins, and to pass them out at sixteen, preferably into the Navy or the Merchant Service, but at any rate as decent members of society. Nor were the boys' nautical experiences entirely stationary, since a wealthy sympathiser (lately deceased) had bequeathed his fine brigantine yacht to serve the ship as a tender and take a few score of the elder or more privileged lads on an annual summer cruise, that they might learn something of practical seamanship.

The yacht—by name the Swallow—an old but shapely craft of some two hundred tons, lay just now a short cable's length from the parent ship, with sails bent and all ready for sea; for by custom the annual cruise started on the day next after the prize-giving.

The question was: Would Link Andrew be allowed to go?

He would have sold his soul to go. He even meditated ways of suicide if the Commander, for a punishment, should veto his going. During the last three weeks he had run up an appalling tally of black marks, and yet it was generally agreed that the Commander would relent if Link would only keep his temper and behave with common prudence for another twenty-four hours.

But this was just what Link seemed wholly unable to do. He hated the ship, the officers, everything in life; and the hot July weather worked upon this hatred until it became a possessing fury.



III.

At dinner-time he very nearly wrecked his chance for good and all.

Shortly before noon a diminutive, mild-looking gentleman, noticeable for his childlike manner and a pair of large round spectacles, came alongside the Egeria in a shore-boat. It appeared that he bore a visitor's ticket for the afternoon function and had arrived thus early by invitation of one of the Committee to take a good look over the ship before the proceedings began. Apparently, too, the Committee-man had sent Commander Headworthy no warning—to judge from that officer's wrathful face and the curt tone in which he invited his visitor to luncheon.

The mild-looking gentleman—who gave his name as Harris—declined courteously, averring that he had brought a sandwich with him. The Commander thereupon turned him over to the Second Officer under whose somewhat impatient escort Mr. Harris made a thorough tour of the ship, peering into everything and asking a number of questions. The boys—whom he amused by opening a large white umbrella, green-lined, to shield him from the noonday sun on the upper deck— promptly christened him "Moonface."

This Mr. Harris, still in charge of the Second Officer, happened along the gun-deck as they finished singing "Be present at our table, Lord," and were sitting down to dinner. From their places they marched up one by one, each with his dinner-basin, to have it filled at the head of the table.

"Hallo, you, Andrew!" called out the Second Officer. "Fetch that basin along here. I want the gentleman to have a look at the ship's food."

Link came forward, stretched out a long arm, and thrust the basin under the visitor's nose.

"Perhaps," said he, "the toff would like a sniff at the same time? There's Sweet Williams for a summer's day!"

"There, that'll do, Link! Go to your place, my lad, and don't be insolent," said the Second Officer hastily, with a nervous glance at Mr. Harris.

But Mr. Harris merely blinked behind his glasses.

"Yes, yes, to be sure," he agreed. "Pork is tricky diet in such weather as we're having!"



IV.

Half an hour later, having detached himself gently from his escort, Mr. Harris wandered back to the upper deck. It appeared to be deserted; and Mr. Harris, unfolding his umbrella against the sun's rays, wandered at will.

In the waist of the vessel, on the port side, he came upon a dais and a baize-covered table with an awning rigged over them; and upon the ship's Schoolmaster, who was busily engaged in arranging the prize-books.

"Good afternoon, sir!" The Schoolmaster, affecting to be busy and polite at the same time, picked out a book and held it up to view. "Smiles on Self Help," he announced.

"You don't say so!" answered Mr. Harris, halting. "But—I mean—they can't very well, can they?"

"Eric, or Little by Little, by the late Archdeacon Farrar. My choice, sir: some light, you see, and others solid, but all pure literature. . . . They value it, too, in after life. Ah, sir, they've a lot of good in 'em! There's many worse characters than my boys walking the world."

Mild Mr. Harris removed his glasses. "Are you talking like that from force of habit?" he asked. "If so, I shall not be so much annoyed."

The Schoolmaster was fairly taken aback. He stared for a moment and shifted his helm, so to speak, with a grin of intelligence and a short laugh.

"Not quite so bad as that, sir," he remonstrated. "It's—it's—well, you may call it the atmosphere. On Speech-day the ship fairly reeks of it."

"And, like the pork, eh! it's just a little bit 'off'?" suggested the visitor, returning his smile. "By the way, I want to ask you a question or two about a boy. His name is Link—Something-or-other."

"Link Andrew?" The Schoolmaster gave him a quick look. "You don't tell me he's in trouble again? Not been annoying you, sir, I hope?"

"On the contrary, I've taken a fancy to the lad; and, by the way again, Link can't be his real name?"

"Short for Abraham Lincoln, as baptised," explained the Schoolmaster. "At least, that's one theory. According to another it's short for 'Missing Link.' Not that the boy's bad-looking; but did you happen to notice the length of his arms—like a gorilla's?"

"I could not avoid doing so."

Mr. Harris related the incident.

"It was exceedingly kind of you, sir, to pass over his conduct so lightly. The fact is, if Link Andrew had been reported again he'd have lost his hammock in the yacht. We all want him to go; some to get rid of him for a spell, and others because we can't help liking the boy. He hates us back, you bet, and has hated us from the moment he set foot on deck, five years ago . . . Whitechapel-reared, I believe. . . . Yet fond of the sea in his way. Once shipped on the yacht he'll behave like an angel. But here on board he's like a young beast in a trap."



V.

Mr. Harris mooned away to the poop-deck, from the rail of which he watched the guests arriving. As Sir Felix's gig was descried putting off from the shore, the boys swarmed up the ratlines and out on the yards, where they dressed ship very prettily. A brass band in the waist hailed his approach with the strains of "Rule, Britannia!" At the head of the accommodation-ladder a guard of honour welcomed him with a hastily rehearsed "Present Arms!" and the boys aloft accompanied it with three shrill British cheers. The dear old gentleman gazed up and around him, and positively beamed.

By this time a crowd of boats had put off, and soon the guests came pouring up the ladder in a steady stream. There were ladies in picture hats. A reporter stood by the gangway taking notes of their costumes. They fell to uttering the prettiest exclamations upon the shipshapeness of everything on board. Mr. Harris saw the First Officer inviting numbers of them to lean over the bulwarks and observe a scar the old ship had received—or so he alleged—at Trafalgar. "How interesting!" they cried.

Well, to be sure, it was interesting. Nelson himself—there was good authority for this at any rate—had once stood on the Egeria's poop; had leaned, perhaps, against the very rail on which Mr. Harris's hand rested. . . . And the function went off very well. The boys clambered down upon deck again, the band played—

"'Tis a Fine Old English Gentleman,"

And all gathered about the awning. Sir Felix, nobly expansive in a buff waistcoat, cleared his throat and spoke of the Empire in a way calculated to bring tears to the eyes. The prize-giving followed.

As it proceeded, Mr. Harris stole down the poop-ladder and edged his way around the back of the crowd to the waist of the ship, where the boys were drawn up with a few officers interspersed to keep discipline. He arrived there just as Link Andrew returned from the dais with two books—the boxing and gymnasium prizes. The boy was foaming at the mouth.

"See, here—Fights for the Flag! And, on top of it, Deeds What Won the Silly Empire! And the old blighter 'oped that I'd be a good boy, and grow up, and win some more. For the likes of him, he meant—Yuss, I don't think! . . . Oh, hold my little hand and check the tearful flow, for I'm to be a ship's boy at 'arf-a-crown a month, and go Empire buildin'!"

"There!" said Mr. Harris, indicating a coil of rope. "Sit down and have it out."



VI.

Some five or six years later, Mr. Harris—who resides in a small West Country town, the name of which does not concern us—was seated in his library reading, when his parlourmaid brought him a card— "Mr. Wilkins, I.T.S. Egeria."

"I scarcely hoped that you would remember me, sir," began the Schoolmaster, on being introduced. "But, happening to pass through— on a holiday trip, a walking tour—I ventured to call and ask news of Link Andrew. You may remember our having a conversation about him once on board the Egeria?"

"I remember it perfectly," said Mr. Harris; "and you'll be glad to hear that Andrew is doing remarkably well; is saving money, in fact, and contemplates getting married."

"Indeed, sir, that is good hearing. I was afraid that he might have left your employment."

"So, to be sure, he has; taking with him, moreover, an excellent character. He is now a second gardener at a steady wage."

"You can't think, sir, how you relieve my mind. To tell the truth, I met him, less than an hour ago; and by his manner . . . But I had better tell you how it happened: I knew, of course, that you had interested yourself in Link and found a job for him. But after he'd left the ship he never let us hear word of his doings. . . . Well, passing through your town just now, I ran up against him. He was coming along the street, and I recognised him on the instant; but all of a sudden he turned and began to stare in at a shop-window—an ironmonger's—giving me his back. I made sure, of course, that he hadn't spied me; so I stepped up and said I, 'Hallo, Link, my lad!' clapping a hand on his shoulder. He turned about, treated me to a long stare, and says he, 'Aren't you makin' some mistake, mister?' 'Why,' says I, 'surely I haven't changed so much as all that since the days I taught you vulgar fractions on board the old Egeria? I'm Mr. Wilkins,' says I. 'Oh, are you?' says he. 'Then, Mr. Wilkins, you can go back to hell and take 'em my compliments there.' That's all he said, and he walked away down the street."

"That's queer," said Mr. Harris, polishing his spectacles. "Yes, he came to me as gardener's boy—I thought it would be a pleasant change after the ship; and he served his apprenticeship well. I remember that in answer to my application the Secretary wrote: 'Of course we prefer to train our lads to the sea; but when one has no aptitude for it—'"

Mr. Harris paused, for the Schoolmaster was smiling broadly.

"Good Lord, sir!—if you'll excuse me. Link Andrew no aptitude for the sea! Why, that lad's seamanship saved my life once: and, what's more, it saved the whole yacht's company! Hasn't he ever told you about it?"

"Not a word. I think," said Mr. Harris, "our friend Link chooses to keep his past in watertight compartments. Sit down and tell me about it."

VII.

This was the Schoolmaster's story:

"It happened on that very cruise, sir. The Swallow had been knocking around at various West Country regattas—Weymouth, Torquay, Dartmouth, finishing up with Plymouth. From Plymouth we were to sail for home.

"We had dropped hook in the Merchant Shipping Anchorage, as they call it; which is the eastern side of the Sound, by Jennycliff Bay. That last day of the regattas—a Saturday—the wind had been almost true north, and freshish, but nothing to mention: beautiful sailing weather for the small boats. The big cracks had finished their engagements and were making back for Southampton.

"Well, as I say, this north wind was a treat; especially coming, as it did, after a week of light airs and calms that had spoilt most of the yacht-racing. Some time in the afternoon I heard talk that our skipper—well, I won't mention names—and, as it turned out in the end, everyone was implicated. Anyhow, at six o'clock or thereabouts the gig was ordered out, and every blessed officer on board went ashore in her; which was clean contrary to regulations, of course, but there happened to be a cinematograph show they all wanted to see at the big music-hall—some prize-fight or other. I don't set much store by prize-fights for my part, and living pictures give me the headache: so, to salve everybody's conscience, I was left in sole charge of the ship.

"Everything went smooth as a buttered cake until about nine o'clock, when the wind, that had been dying down all the time, suddenly flew west and began to gather strength hand over fist. . . . I never, not being a seaman, could have believed—till I saw and felt it—the change that came over Plymouth Sound in the space of one half-hour. The gig had been ordered again for nine-thirty, to pull to the Barbican Steps and be ready at ten to bring the officers on board. But before nine-thirty I began to have my serious doubts about sending her. It was just as well I had.

"For by nine-forty-five it was blowing a real gale, and by ten o'clock something like a hurricane. Just then, to top my terror, Master Link Andrew came aft to me—the wind seemed to blow him along—and 'I beg your pardon, Mr. Wilkins,' said he, 'but in my opinion she's dragging.'

"Just think of it, sir! There was I, in sole charge of a hundred boys or so, and knowing no more what to do than the ship's cat. . . . She was dragging, too; sagging foot by foot in towards the dark of Jennycliff Bay.

"'If you'll take a word from me, sir,' said Link, 'we'd best up sail and get out of this.'

"'What about the other anchor?' I suggested.

"' Try it if you like,' said he. 'In my belief it won't hold any more than a tin mustard-pot.'

"Nor did it, when we let go. He came back after a few minutes from the darkness forward. 'No go,' said he. 'Nothing to do but slip and clear.'

"There was no question, either, that he spoke sense. 'But where?' I shouted at him. 'Drake's Island? . . . And who's to do it, even so?'

"'The anchorage is crowded under Drake's Island,' he shouted back. 'It's the devil-among-the-tailors we'd play there, if we ever fetched. . . . Breakwater's no shelter either.'

"He seemed to whistle to himself for a moment; and the next I heard him yell out sharply to the boys forward to tumble on the mainsail, strip her covers off, double-reef and hoist her. He took command from that moment. While a score of them flew to tackle this job, he beat his way forward and called on another lot to get out the staysail. Back he ran again, cursing and calling on all and sundry to look smart. Next he was at my side ordering me to unlash the wheel and stand by. 'It's touch-and-go, sir.'

"'Hadn't we better send up a flare?' I suggested feebly.

"'Flare your bloomin' grandmother!' From this moment I regret to say that Link Andrew treated me with contempt. He next ordered a dozen small boys aloft, to reef and set her upper square-sail. When I urged that it was as good as asking them to commit suicide, he cursed me openly. 'Drown the poor pups, will I? I thought—damn you all!— you laid yourselves out to breed seamen! You say you do, at prize-givings!' He ran forward again to get the hawsers buoyed before slipping them.

"I never remember a sound more sickening to the stomach than those chains made as they ran out through the hawse-holes. The one mistake Link committed was in ordering the upper square-sail to be reefed. By the mercy of God not a child was blown off the yards in that operation; yet it was no sooner concluded than, having by this time found a megaphone, he shouted up to them to undo their work and shake out the reef.

"'That's madness!' I yelled from the wheel, where I clung dripping, blindly pressing down the spokes and easing them as he checked me. 'Look to leeward, you blighter!' he yelled back.

"The ship had payed off slowly, and while she gathered way, was drifting straight down upon an Italian barque that two hours ago had lain more than a cable's length from us. . . . I thought our lower yard—we heeled so—would have smacked against her bowsprit-end; and from the outcries on board the Italian I rather fancy her crew expected it. But we shaved her by a yard or so, as Link pushed me away from the wheel and took charge. A moment later she had dropped behind us into the night, and we were surging in full-tilt for Plymouth, heaving over at the Lord knows what angle.

"But we were off; we were clear; and, strange to say, the worst of it was over. The wind was worsening, if anything, and we continued to drive at a frightful angle. Now and again we slanted to a squall that fairly dipped us till the sea poured half-way across her decks. As I staggered forward—clutching at anything handy—to assure myself that none of the boys had been flung off the fore-yard and overboard, I heard a sea burst the starboard bulwarks, and in another moment, while I yet wondered if the sound came from something parting aloft, with a 'Wa-ay-oh!' Link had put over her helm, and the suddenly altered slant flung me into the scuppers, where I dropped after taking a knock against the standing rigging, the mark of which I shall carry on my forehead till I die.

"By this time, sir, I was pretty well dazed. I forget if it was in a couple of short tacks, or in three, that we fetched Picklecombe Point on the western side. Then we put about on a long tack that carried us well outside the breakwater and came in for Cawsand Bay and safety. On this last fetch Link kicked me up and gave me the wheel again, while he went forward to hunt up the spare anchor.

"We brought up, well in shelter, at something before two in the morning, not a hand lost. Before anyone was allowed to turn in, Link had every sail stowed and covered—'for the honour of the blasted ship,' as he put it.

"The skipper and his precious lot came aboard next day not long before noon, and after a wholesome scare. It seems they were late, and all pretty so-so by the time they reached the Barbican Steps; and, let be that there was no boat for them, the watermen one and all declined to take them off in any such weather. Nothing for it but to doss the night ashore, which they did. But I wouldn't give much for their feelings next morning when they put off and, lo! there was no Swallow in the Merchant Shipping Anchorage. In Cawsand Bay, you understand, we were well hidden by the land, and it cost them at least a couple of hours to guess our whereabouts.

"Long as the time was, it wasn't enough to wear out the effects of the—well, the Cinematograph. A yellower set, or a bluer in the gills, you never set eyes on. They came aboard, and the skipper, having made some inquiries of me, called up Link, cleared his throat quite in the old approved style, and began to make a speech.

"Link cut it short.

"'All right, my precious swine! Now step below and wash off the traces. If you behave pretty, maybe I'll not report you.'"



VIII.

"That finished the lot," wound up the Schoolmaster. "There was no answer to it, if you come to think."

"And Link never told?"

"Never a word, sir. Nor did I. But the story leaked out somehow, and it gave the Commander the whip-hand of his Committee, to ship a new set of officers. Ship and tender, sir, the Egeria nowadays is something to be proud of. But for my part I don't go on any more of these summer cruises. The open sea never suited my stomach, and I prefer a walk for my holiday."



LIEUTENANT LAPENOTIERE.

The night-porter at the Admiralty had been sleeping in his chair. He was red-eyed and wore his livery coat buttoned at random. He grumbled to himself as he opened the great door.

He carried a glass-screened candle, and held it somewhat above the level of his forehead—which was protuberant and heavily pock-marked. Under the light he peered out at the visitor, who stood tall and stiff, with uniform overcoat buttoned to the chin, between the Ionic pillars of the portico.

"Who's there?"

"Lieutenant Lapenotiere, of the Pickle schooner—with dispatches."

"Dispatches?" echoed the night-porter. Out beyond the screen of masonry that shut off the Board of Admiralty's forecourt from Whitehall, one of the tired post-horses started blowing through its nostrils on this foggy night.

"From Admiral Collingwood—Mediterranean Fleet off Cadiz—sixteen days," answered the visitor curtly. "Is everyone abed?"

"Admiral Collingwood? Why Admiral Collingwood?" The night-porter fell back a pace, opening the door a trifle wider. "Good God, sir! You don't say as how—"

"You can fetch down a Secretary or someone, I hope?" said Lieutenant Lapenotiere, quickly stepping past him into the long dim hall. "My dispatches are of the first importance. I have posted up from Falmouth without halt but for relays."

As the man closed the door, he heard his post-boy of the last relay slap one of the horses encouragingly before heading home to stable. The chaise wheels began to move on the cobbles.

"His Lordship himself will see you, sir. Of that I make no doubt," twittered the night-porter, fumbling with the bolt. "There was a terrible disturbance, back in July, when Captain Bettesworth arrived—not so late as this, to be sure, but towards midnight—and they waited till morning, to carry up the dispatches with his Lordship's chocolate. Thankful was I next day not to have been on duty at the time. . . . If you will follow me, sir—"

Lieutenant Lapenotiere had turned instinctively towards a door on the right. It admitted to the Waiting Room, and there were few officers in the service who did not know—and only too well—that Chamber of Hope Deferred.

"No, sir, . . . this way, if you please," the night-porter corrected him, and opened a door on the left. "The Captains' Room," he announced, passing in and steering for the chimney-shelf, on which stood a pair of silver sconces each carrying three wax candles. These he took down, lit and replaced. "Ah, sir! Many's the time I've showed Lord Nelson himself into this room, in the days before Sir Horatio, and even after. And you were sayin'—"

"I said nothing."

The man moved to the door; but halted there and came back, as though in his own despite.

"I can't help it, sir. . . . Half a guinea he used to give me, regular. But the last time—and hard to believe 'twas little more than a month ago—he halts on his way out, and says he, searchin' awkward-like in his breeches' pocket with his left hand, 'Ned,' says he, 'my old friend'—aye, sir, his old friend he called me—'Ned,' says he, pullin' out a fistful o' gold, 'my old friend,' says he, 'I'll compound with you for two guineas, this bein' the last time you may hold the door open for me, in or out. But you must pick 'em out,' says he, spreadin' his blessed fingers with the gold in 'em: 'for a man can't count money who's lost his right flapper.' Those were his words, sir. 'Old friend,' he called me, in that way of his."

Lieutenant Lapenotiere pointed to his left arm. Around the sleeve a black scarf was knotted.

"Dead, sir," the night-porter hushed his voice.

"Dead," echoed Lieutenant Lapenotiere, staring at the Turkey carpet, of which the six candles, gaining strength, barely illumined the pattern. "Dead, at the top of victory; a great victory. Go: fetch somebody down."

The night-porter shuffled off. Lieutenant Lapenotiere, erect and sombre, cast a look around the apartment, into which he had never before been admitted. The candles lit up a large painting—a queer bird's-eye view of Venice. Other pictures, dark and bituminous, decorated the panelled walls—portraits of dead admirals, a sea-piece or two, some charts. . . . This was all he discerned out in the dim light; and in fact he scanned the walls, the furniture of the room, inattentively. His stomach was fasting, his head light with rapid travel; above all, he had a sense of wonder that all this should be happening to him. For, albeit a distinguished officer, he was a modest man, and by habit considered himself of no great importance; albeit a brave man, too, he shrank at the thought of the message he carried—a message to explode and shake millions of men in a confusion of wild joy or grief.

For about the tenth time in those sixteen days it seemed to burst and escape in an actual detonation, splitting his head—there, as he waited in the strange room where never a curtain stirred. . . . It was a trick his brain played him, repeating, echoing the awful explosion of the French seventy-four Achille, which had blown up towards the close of the battle. When the ship was ablaze and sinking, his own crew had put off in boats to rescue the Frenchmen, at close risk of their own lives, for her loaded guns, as they grew red-hot, went off at random among rescuers and rescued. . . .

As had happened before when he felt this queer shock, his mind travelled back and he seemed to hear the series of discharges running up at short intervals to the great catastrophe. . . . To divert his thoughts, he turned to study the view of Venice above the chimney-piece . . . and on a sudden faced about again.

He had a sensation that someone was in the room—someone standing close behind him.

But no. . . . For the briefest instant his eyes rested on an indistinct shadow—his own perhaps, cast by the candle-light? Yet why should it lie lengthwise there, shaped like a coffin, on the dark polished table that occupied the middle of the room?

The answer was that it did not. Before he could rub his eyes it had gone. Moreover, he had turned to recognise a living being . . . and no living person was in the room, unless by chance (absurd supposition) one were hidden behind the dark red window curtains.

"Recognise" may seem a strange word to use; but here had lain the strangeness of the sensation—that the someone standing there was a friend, waiting to be greeted. It was with eagerness and a curious warmth of the heart that Lieutenant Lapenotiere had faced about—upon nothing.

He continued to stare in a puzzled way at the window curtains, when a voice by the door said:

"Good evening!—or perhaps, to be correct, good morning! You are Mr.—"

"Lapenotiere," answered the Lieutenant, who had turned sharply. The voice—a gentleman's and pleasantly modulated—was not one he knew; nor did he recognise the speaker—a youngish, shrewd-looking man, dressed in civilian black, with knee-breeches. "Lapenotiere—of the Pickle schooner."

"Yes, yes—the porter bungled your name badly, but I guessed. Lord Barham will see you personally. He is, in fact, dressing with all haste at this moment. . . . I am his private secretary," explained the shrewd-looking gentleman in his quiet, business-like voice. "Will you come with me upstairs?"

Lieutenant Lapenotiere followed him. At the foot of the great staircase the Secretary turned.

"I may take it, sir, that we are not lightly disturbing his Lordship—who is an old man."

"The news is of great moment, sir. Greater could scarcely be."

The Secretary bent his head. As they went up the staircase Lieutenant Lapenotiere looked back and caught sight of the night-porter in the middle of the hall, planted there and gazing up, following their ascent.

On the first-floor landing they were met by a truly ridiculous spectacle. There emerged from a doorway on the left of the wide corridor an old gentleman clad in night-cap, night-shirt and bedroom slippers, buttoning his breeches and cursing vigorously; while close upon him followed a valet with dressing-gown on one arm, waistcoat and wig on the other, vainly striving to keep pace with his master's impatience.

"The braces, my lord—your Lordship has them forepart behind, if I may suggest—"

"Damn the braces!" swore the old gentleman. "Where is he? Hi, Tylney!" as he caught sight of the Secretary. "Where are we to go? My room, I suppose?"

"The fire is out there, my lord. . . . 'Tis past three in the morning. But after sending word to awake you, I hunted round and by good luck found a plenty of promising embers in the Board Room grate. On top of these I've piled what remained of my own fire, and Dobson has set a lamp there—"

"You've been devilish quick, Tylney. Dressed like a buck you are, too!"

"Your Lordship's wig," suggested the valet.

"Damn the wig!" Lord Barham snatched it and attempted to stick it on top of his night-cap, damned the night-cap, and, plucking it off, flung it to the man.

"I happened to be sitting up late, my lord, over the Aeolus papers," said Mr. Secretary Tylney.

"Ha?" Then, to the valet, "The dressing-gown there! Don't fumble! . . . So this is Captain—"

"Lieutenant, sir: Lapenotiere, commanding the Pickle schooner."

The Lieutenant saluted.

"From the Fleet, my lord—off Cadiz; or rather, off Cape Trafalgaro."

He drew the sealed dispatch from an inner breast-pocket and handed it to the First Lord.

"Here, step into the Board Room. . . . Where the devil are my spectacles?" he demanded of the valet, who had sprung forward to hold open the door.

Evidently the Board Room had been but a few hours ago the scene of a large dinner-party. Glasses, dessert-plates, dishes of fruit, decanters empty and half empty, cumbered the great mahogany table as dead and wounded, guns and tumbrils, might a battlefield. Chairs stood askew; crumpled napkins lay as they had been dropped or tossed, some on the floor, others across the table between the dishes.

"Looks cosy, eh?" commented the First Lord. "Maggs, set a screen around the fire, and look about for a decanter and some clean glasses."

He drew a chair close to the reviving fire, and glanced at the cover of the dispatch before breaking its seal.

"Nelson's handwriting?" he asked. It was plain that his old eyes, unaided by spectacles, saw the superscription only as a blur.

"No, my lord: Admiral Collingwood's," said Lieutenant Lapenotiere, inclining his head.

Old Lord Barham looked up sharply. His wig set awry, he made a ridiculous figure in his hastily donned garments. Yet he did not lack dignity.

"Why Collingwood?" he asked, his fingers breaking the seal. "God! you don't tell me—"

"Lord Nelson is dead, sir."

"Dead—dead? . . . Here, Tylney—you read what it says. Dead? . . . No, damme, let the captain tell his tale. Briefly, sir."

"Briefly, sir—Lord Nelson had word of Admiral Villeneuve coming out of the Straits, and engaged the combined fleets off Cape Trafalgaro. They were in single line, roughly; and he bore down in two columns, and cut off their van under Dumanoir. This was at dawn or thereabouts, and by five o'clock the enemy was destroyed."

"How many prizes?"

"I cannot say precisely, my lord. The word went, when I was signalled aboard the Vice-Admiral's flagship, that either fifteen or sixteen had struck. My own men were engaged, at the time, in rescuing the crew of a French seventy-four that had blown up; and I was too busy to count, had counting been possible. One or two of my officers maintain to me that our gains were higher. But the dispatch will tell, doubtless."

"Aye, to be sure. . . . Read, Tylney. Don't sit there clearing your throat, but read, man alive!" And yet it appeared that while the Secretary was willing enough to read, the First Lord had no capacity, as yet, to listen. Into the very first sentence he broke with—

"No, wait a minute. 'Dead,' d'ye say? . . . My God! . . . Lieutenant, pour yourself a glass of wine and tell us first how it happened."

Lieutenant Lapenotiere could not tell very clearly. He had twice been summoned to board the Royal Sovereign—he first time to receive the command to hold himself ready. It was then that, coming alongside the great ship, he had read in all the officers' faces an anxiety hard to reconcile with the evident tokens of victory around them. At once it had occurred to him that the Admiral had fallen, and he put the question to one of the lieutenants—to be told that Lord Nelson had indeed been mortally wounded and could not live long; but that he must be alive yet, and conscious, since the Victory was still signalling orders to the Fleet.

"I think, my lord," said he, "that Admiral Collingwood must have been doubtful, just then, what responsibility had fallen upon him, or how soon it might fall. He had sent for me to 'stand by' so to speak. He was good enough to tell me the news as it had reached him—"

Here Lieutenant Lapenotiere, obeying the order to fill his glass, let spill some of the wine on the table. The sight of the dark trickle on the mahogany touched some nerve of the brain: he saw it widen into a pool of blood, from which, as they picked up a shattered seaman and bore him below, a lazy stream crept across the deck of the flag-ship towards the scuppers. He moved his feet, as he had moved them then, to be out of the way of it: but recovered himself in another moment and went on—

"He told me, my lord, that the Victory after passing under the Bucentaure's stern, and so raking her that she was put out of action, or almost, fell alongside the Redoutable. There was a long swell running, with next to no wind, and the two ships could hardly have cleared had they tried. At any rate, they hooked, and it was then a question which could hammer the harder. The Frenchman had filled his tops with sharp-shooters, and from one of these— the mizen-top, I believe—a musket-ball struck down the Admiral. He was walking at the time to and fro on a sort of gangway he had caused to be planked over his cabin sky-light, between the wheel and the ladder-way. . . . Admiral Collingwood believed it had happened about half-past one . . ."

"Sit down, man, and drink your wine," commanded the First Lord as the dispatch-bearer swayed with a sudden faintness.

"It is nothing, my lord—"

But it must have been a real swoon, or something very like it: for he recovered to find himself lying in an arm-chair. He heard the Secretary's voice reading steadily on and on. . . . Also they must have given him wine, for he awoke to feel the warmth of it in his veins and coursing about his heart. But he was weak yet, and for the moment well content to lie still and listen.

Resting there and listening, he was aware of two sensations that alternated within him, chasing each other in and out of his consciousness. He felt all the while that he, John Richards Lapenotiere, a junior officer in His Majesty's service, was assisting in one of the most momentous events in his country's history; and alone in the room with these two men, he felt it as he had never begun to feel it amid the smoke and roar of the actual battle. He had seen the dead hero but half a dozen times in his life: he had never been honoured by a word from him: but like every other naval officer, he had come to look up to Nelson as to the splendid particular star among commanders. There was greatness: there was that which lifted men to such deeds as write man's name across the firmament! And, strange to say, Lieutenant Lapenotiere recognised something of it in this queer old man, in dressing-gown and ill-fitting wig, who took snuff and interrupted now with a curse and anon with a "bravo!" as the Secretary read. He was absurd: but he was no common man, this Lord Barham. He had something of the ineffable aura of greatness.

But in the Lieutenant's brain, across this serious, even awful sense of the moment and of its meaning, there played a curious secondary sense that the moment was not—that what was happening before his eyes had either happened before or was happening in some vacuum in which past, present, future and the ordinary divisions of time had lost their bearings. The great twenty-four-hour clock at the end of the Board Room, ticking on and on while the Secretary read, wore an unfamiliar face. . . . Yes, time had gone wrong, somehow: and the events of the passage home to Falmouth, of the journey up to the doors of the Admiralty, though they ran on a chain, had no intervals to be measured by a clock, but followed one another like pictures on a wall. He saw the long, indigo-coloured swell thrusting the broken ships shoreward. He felt the wind freshening as it southered and he left the Fleet behind: he watched their many lanterns as they sank out of sight, then the glow of flares by the light of which dead-tired men were repairing damages, cutting away wreckage. His ship was wallowing heavily now, with the gale after her,—and now dawn was breaking clean and glorious on the swell off Lizard Point. A Mount's Bay lugger had spied them, and lying in wait, had sheered up close alongside, her crew bawling for news. He had not forbidden his men to call it back, and he could see the fellows' faces now, as it reached them from the speaking-trumpet: "Great victory—twenty taken or sunk—Admiral Nelson killed!" They had guessed something, noting the Pickle's ensign at half-mast: yet as they took in the purport of the last three words, these honest fishermen had turned and stared at one another; and without one answering word, the lugger had been headed straight back to the mainland.