[NOTE] (continued 2)

A certain full chink of money stopped him.

“Thankee,” he said, after a short negotiation. “I’ll own you’ve done the handsome, sir, and we’ve no cause to complain. Not but what I had to give——”

“Good night!” said the Professor.

Not till they were gone, locked out, and the very trail of their filthy footsteps hidden under the black droppings of the night, did he turn, for all his impatience, and regard the body again.

“Nancy,” he murmured to himself; “yes, it’s Nancy.”

Into the vast study of biology it is perfectly certain that a personal knowledge of biogenesis must enter. Here, too, the individual must be sacrificed to the cause. Well, by virtue of that phase in his career before-mentioned, he had already once made of Nancy a holocaust to science. If the fruits of that sacrifice had been to be found in a ruined life, a social degradation, a gradual decline upon infamy, what was it all to him? As german to the general subject as the dead specimens on his walls was the living specimen of his passion. Ex abusu non arguitur ad usum. Still, it was a strange coincidence that she should come thus to consummate his work.

Looking upon her frozen face, he was aware of certain tell-tale, rudely-erased tokens about the mouth. He never had a doubt as to what they signified. It was a rude kiss that of the pitch-plaster, more close and savage than any he himself had once pressed upon those blistered lips. So, the murderous beasts had gone the short way to supply his urgency! Would they have taken it none the less, he wondered, if they could have known in what relation their victim once stood towards their employer? Very likely. Very justly, too, could they believe him consistent with himself.

Nevertheless, though he had no conscience, though he had too often scored that fact on human flesh with a knife to be in any doubt about it, it was notable that, as he moved now, perfectly cold and collected, to make some selection of tools from the table hard by, he was registering to himself a vow, mortal to some folks, that no effort of his should be lacking to help bring certain vile instruments to their judgment—so soon as his disuse of them should find warrant in a fuller supply of the legitimate material.

As he groped for what he wanted, a sparrow twittered somewhere in the dark outside. He started, and dwelt a moment listening. Birds! the little false priests of haunted woods, who sang their lying benedictions over every folly perpetrated in their green shades! Why, he had loathed them, even while he had been making their loves the text for this early experiment of his in rustic nature. They had been singing when——grasping his knife firmly, he returned to the table.

Something had happened there. For one moment the blade shook in his hand. To his practised eye there were signs—the ghostliest, the most remote—but signs still. A movement—a tremor—the faintest, faintest vibration of a soul, unreleased, struggling to return to the surface—that was what he felt rather than saw. He recalled the hasty character of the deed; he thought of the shock, of the suspended trance into which such a deed might cast a sensitive subject. Mastering himself, with the dry firm will of an operator, he walked once more unhurriedly to the instrument table, and made a further selection.

The sparrow twittered again. Birds in the wood—small procuresses to Sentiment! What a trollop she was, that Sentiment! He had known ethereal creatures go from picking the bones of stuffed larks, to moralize sweetly on the song of nightingales under the moon. For himself, barring his natural asceticism, he would have no remorse whatever in devouring nightingales. Such emotions were born of surfeit, and the moral of them all was that a bird in the stomach was worth two, or two hundred, in the bush. The one was the decoy which brought the many into notice. Why, he himself, when flushed with passion——

Harder than steel, hard as flesh can be, he stepped back to the table.

Yes, there was no longer doubt about it. He must decide quickly. Decide! What was there in all his life to warrant in him a moment’s indecision? His pledge to to-morrow was paramount over his pledge to yesterday. It was by very virtue of the past that he owed everything to the future. The Cause was himself, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. As she had made herself one with him, so must she consummate the gift. He chose to believe, even, that she would not hesitate could she know. He grasped his knife.

Her hair! He had said some foolish things about it once. In a sudden fury he seized it, and sliced it off close by her head, and flung it aside. She looked strangely innocent and boyish thus shorn. He had a momentary grotesque thought that he would excuse himself to himself by pretending that she was a boy. It passed on the instant. What excuse was necessary? He remembered how once, to his idle amusement, when she had fancied herself secure of him, she had coveted greatness for his future. Well, it was within his grasp at length, and by her final means.

Damn the sparrow! What was there in all the murky town to tempt his twittering? He had blunted his knife’s edge on the hair. He must fetch another.

As he came back with it, the bird seemed to flutter and cry out against his very door. In a swift access of passion he strode to it, and opened. Whether old, or wounded, or poisoned in the drooping fog, there lay the little thing, gasping, with outspread wings, upon the pavement. One moment the Professor hesitated; then, crushing out the tiny shrieking life under his foot, he relocked the door and returned with a firm step to the table.

* * * * *

His treatise, read the next day before an august body, was said masterly to resolve an intricate and long obscure physiologic problem.

It brought him additional and great honour, and, what he prized above all, that gift of the Society’s gold medal, which is only granted to discoveries of the first importance. But then, it must be remembered, he had given his soul to the Cause. The stain of its sacrifice was yet red on the stones outside his door.

A GHOST-CHILD

In making this confession public, I am aware that I am giving a butterfly to be broken on a wheel. There is so much of delicacy in its subject, that the mere resolve to handle it at all might seem to imply a lack of the sensitiveness necessary to its understanding; and it is certain that the more reverent the touch, the more irresistible will figure its opportunity to the common scepticism which is bondslave to its five senses. Moreover one cannot, in the reason of things, write to publish for Aristarchus alone; but the gauntlet of Grub Street must be run in any bid for truth and sincerity.

On the other hand, to withhold from evidence, in these days of what one may call a zetetic psychology, anything which may appear elucidatory, however exquisitely and rarely, of our spiritual relationships, must be pronounced, I think, a sin against the Holy Ghost.

All in all, therefore, I decide to give, with every passage to personal identification safeguarded, the story of a possession, or visitation, which is signified in the title to my narrative.

Tryphena was the sole orphaned representative of an obscure but gentle family which had lived for generations in the east of England. The spirit of the fens, of the long grey marshes, whose shores are the neutral ground of two elements, slumbered in her eyes. Looking into them, one seemed to see little beds of tiny green mosses luminous under water, or stirred by the movement of microscopic life in their midst. Secrets, one felt, were shadowed in their depths, too frail and sweet for understanding. The pretty love-fancy of babies seen in the eyes of maidens, was in hers to be interpreted into the very cosmic dust of sea-urchins, sparkling like chrysoberyls. Her soul looked out through them, as if they were the windows of a water-nursery.

She was always a child among children, in heart and knowledge most innocent, until Jason came and stood in her field of vision. Then, spirit of the neutral ground as she was, inclining to earth or water with the sway of the tides, she came wondering and dripping, as it were, to land, and took up her abode for final choice among the daughters of the earth. She knew her woman’s estate, in fact, and the irresistible attraction of all completed perfections to the light that burns to destroy them.

Tryphena was not only an orphan, but an heiress. Her considerable estate was administered by her guardian, Jason’s father, a widower, who was possessed of this single adored child. The fruits of parental infatuation had come early to ripen on the seedling. The boy was self-willed and perverse, the more so as he was naturally of a hot-hearted disposition. Violence and remorse would sway him in alternate moods, and be made, each in its turn, a self-indulgence. He took a delight in crossing his father’s wishes, and no less in atoning for his gracelessness with moving demonstrations of affection.

Foremost of the old man’s most cherished projects was, very naturally, a union between the two young people. He planned, manœuvred, spoke for it with all his heart of love and eloquence. And, indeed, it seemed at last as if his hopes were to be crowned. Jason, returning from a lengthy voyage (for his enterprising spirit had early decided for the sea, and he was a naval officer), saw, and was struck amazed before, the transformed vision of his old child-playfellow. She was an opened flower whom he had left a green bud—a thing so rare and flawless that it seemed a sacrilege for earthly passions to converse of her. Familiarity, however, and some sense of reciprocal attraction, quickly dethroned that eucharist. Tryphena could blush, could thrill, could solicit, in the sweet ways of innocent womanhood. She loved him dearly, wholly, it was plain—had found the realization of all her old formless dreams in this wondrous birth of a desire for one, in whose new-impassioned eyes she had known herself reflected hitherto only for the most patronized of small gossips. And, for her part, fearless as nature, she made no secret of her love. She was absorbed in, a captive to, Jason from that moment and for ever.

He responded. What man, however perverse, could have resisted, on first appeal, the attraction of such beauty, the flower of a radiant soul? The two were betrothed; the old man’s cup of happiness was brimmed.

Then came clouds and a cold wind, chilling the garden of Hesperis. Jason was always one of those who, possessing classic noses, will cut them off, on easy provocation, to spite their faces. He was so proudly independent, to himself, that he resented the least assumption of proprietorship in him on the part of other people—even of those who had the best claim to his love and submission. This pride was an obsession. It stultified the real good in him, which was considerable. Apart from it, he was a good, warm-tempered fellow, hasty but affectionate. Under its dominion, he would have broken his own heart on an imaginary grievance.

He found one, it is to be supposed, in the privileges assumed by love; in its exacting claims upon him; perhaps in its little unreasoning jealousies. He distorted these into an implied conceit of authority over him on the part of an heiress who was condescending to his meaner fortunes. The suggestion was quite base and without warrant; but pride has no balance. No doubt, moreover, the rather childish self-depreciations of the old man, his father, in his attitude towards a match he had so fondly desired, helped to aggravate this feeling. The upshot was that, when within a few months of the date which was to make his union with Tryphena eternal, Jason broke away from a restraint which his pride pictured to him as intolerable, and went on a yachting expedition with a friend.

Then, at once, and with characteristic violence, came the reaction. He wrote, impetuously, frenziedly, from a distant port, claiming himself Tryphena’s, and Tryphena his, for ever and ever and ever. They were man and wife before God. He had behaved like an insensate brute, and he was at that moment starting to speed to her side, to beg her forgiveness and the return of her love.

He had no need to play the suitor afresh. She had never doubted or questioned their mutual bondage, and would have died a maid for his sake. Something of sweet exultation only seemed to quicken and leap in her body, that her faith in her dear love was vindicated.

But the joy came near to upset the reason of the old man, already tottering to its dotage; and what followed destroyed it utterly.

The yacht, flying home, was lost at sea, and Jason was drowned.

I once saw Tryphena about this time. She lived with her near mindless charge, lonely, in an old grey house upon the borders of a salt mere, and had little but the unearthly cries of seabirds to answer to the questions of her widowed heart. She worked, sweet in charity, among the marsh folk, a beautiful unearthly presence; and was especially to be found where infants and the troubles of child-bearing women called for her help and sympathy. She was a wife herself, she would say quaintly; and some day perhaps, by grace of the good spirits of the sea, would be a mother. None thought to cross her statement, put with so sweet a sanity; and, indeed, I have often noticed that the neighbourhood of great waters breeds in souls a mysticism which is remote from the very understanding of land-dwellers.

How I saw her was thus:—

I was fishing, on a day of chill calm, in a dinghy off the flat coast. The stillness of the morning had tempted me some distance from the village where I was staying. Presently a sense of bad sport and healthy famine “plumped” in me, so to speak, for luncheon, and I looked about for a spot picturesque enough to add a zest to sandwiches, whisky, and tobacco. Close by, a little creek or estuary ran up into a mere, between which and the sea lay a cluster of low sand-hills; and thither I pulled. The spot, when I reached it, was calm, chill desolation manifest—lifeless water and lifeless sand, with no traffic between them but the dead interchange of salt. Low sedges, at first, and behind them low woods were mirrored in the water at a distance, with an interval between me and them of sheeted glass; and right across this shining pool ran a dim, half-drowned causeway—the sea-path, it appeared, to and from a lonely house which I could just distinguish squatting among trees. It was Tryphena’s home.

Now, paddling dispiritedly, I turned a cold dune, and saw a mermaid before me. At least, that was my instant impression. The creature sat coiled on the strand, combing her hair—that was certain, for I saw the gold-green tresses of it whisked by her action into rainbow threads. It appeared as certain that her upper half was flesh and her lower fish; and it was only on my nearer approach that this latter resolved itself into a pale green skirt, roped, owing to her posture, about her limbs, and the hem fanned out at her feet into a tail fin. Thus also her bosom, which had appeared naked, became a bodice, as near to her flesh in colour and texture as a smock is to a lady’s-smock, which some call a cuckoo-flower.

It was plain enough now; yet the illusion for the moment had quite startled me.

As I came near, she paused in her strange business to canvass me. It was Tryphena herself, as after-inquiry informed me. I have never seen so lovely a creature. Her eyes, as they regarded me passing, were something to haunt a dream: so great in tragedy—not fathomless, but all in motion near their surfaces, it seemed, with green and rooted sorrows. They were the eyes, I thought, of an Undine late-humanized, late awakened to the rapturous and troubled knowledge of the woman’s burden. Her forehead was most fair, and the glistening thatch divided on it like a golden cloud revealing the face of a wondering angel.

I passed, and a sand-heap stole my vision foot by foot. The vision was gone when I returned. I have reason to believe it was vouchsafed me within a few months of the coming of the ghost-child.

On the morning succeeding the night of the day on which Jason and Tryphena were to have been married, the girl came down from her bedroom with an extraordinary expression of still rapture on her face. After breakfast she took the old man into her confidence. She was childish still; her manner quite youthfully thrilling; but now there was a new-born wonder in it that hovered on the pink of shame.

“Father! I have been under the deep waters and found him. He came to me last night in my dreams—so sobbing, so impassioned—to assure me that he had never really ceased to love me, though he had near broken his own heart pretending it. Poor boy! poor ghost! What could I do but take him to my arms? And all night he lay there, blest and forgiven, till in the morning he melted away with a sigh that woke me; and it seemed to me that I came up dripping from the sea.”

“My boy! He has come back!” chuckled the old man. “What have you done with him, Tryphena?”

“I will hold him tighter the next time,” she said.

But the spirit of Jason visited her dreams no more.

That was in March. In the Christmas following, when the mere was locked in stillness, and the wan reflection of snow mingled on the ceiling with the red dance of firelight, one morning the old man came hurrying and panting to Tryphena’s door.

“Tryphena! Come down quickly! My boy, my Jason, has come back! It was a lie that they told us about his being lost at sea!”

Her heart leapt like a candle-flame! What new delusion of the old man’s was this? She hurried over her dressing and descended. A garrulous old voice mingled with a childish treble in the breakfast-room. Hardly breathing, she turned the handle of the door, and saw Jason before her.

But it was Jason, the prattling babe of her first knowledge; Jason, the flaxen-headed, apple-cheeked cherub of the nursery; Jason, the confiding, the merry, the loving, before pride had come to warp his innocence. She fell on her knees to the child, and with a burst of ecstasy caught him to her heart.

She asked no question of the old man as to when or whence this apparition had come, or why he was here. For some reason she dared not. She accepted him as some waif, whom an accidental likeness had made glorious to their hungering hearts. As for the father, he was utterly satisfied and content. He had heard a knock at the door, he said, and had opened it and found this. The child was naked, and his pink, wet body glazed with ice. Yet he seemed insensible to the killing cold. It was Jason—that was enough. There is no date nor time for imbecility. Its phantoms spring from the clash of ancient memories. This was just as actually his child as—more so, in fact, than—the grown young figure which, for all its manhood, had dissolved into the mist of waters. He was more familiar with, more confident of it, after all. It had come back to be unquestioningly dependent on him; and that was likest the real Jason, flesh of his flesh.

“Who are you, darling?” said Tryphena.

“I am Jason,” answered the child.

She wept, and fondled him rapturously.

“And who am I?” she asked. “If you are Jason, you must know what to call me.”

“I know,” he said; “but I mustn’t, unless you ask me.”

“I won’t,” she answered, with a burst of weeping. “It is Christmas Day, dearest, when the miracle of a little child was wrought. I will ask you nothing but to stay and bless our desolate home.”

He nodded, laughing.

“I will stay, until you ask me.”

They found some little old robes of the baby Jason, put away in lavender, and dressed him in them. All day he laughed and prattled; yet it was strange that, talk as he might, he never once referred to matters familiar to the childhood of the lost sailor.

In the early afternoon he asked to be taken out—seawards, that was his wish. Tryphena clothed him warmly, and, taking his little hand, led him away. They left the old man sleeping peacefully. He was never to wake again.

As they crossed the narrow causeway, snow, thick and silent, began to fall. Tryphena was not afraid, for herself or the child. A rapture upheld her; a sense of some compelling happiness, which she knew before long must take shape on her lips.

They reached the seaward dunes—mere ghosts of foothold in that smoke of flakes. The lap of vast waters seemed all around them, hollow and mysterious. The sound flooded Tryphena’s ears, drowning her senses. She cried out, and stopped.

“Before they go,” she screamed—“before they go, tell me what you were to call me!”

The child sprang a little distance, and stood facing her. Already his lower limbs seemed dissolving in the mists.

“I was to call you ‘mother’!” he cried, with a smile and toss of his hand.

Even as he spoke, his pretty features wavered and vanished. The snow broke into him, or he became part with it. Where he had been, a gleam of iridescent dust seemed to show one moment before it sank and was extinguished in the falling cloud. Then there was only the snow, heaping an eternal chaos with nothingness.

Tryphena made this confession, on a Christmas Eve night, to one who was a believer in dreams. The next morning she was seen to cross the causeway, and thereafter was never seen again. But she left the sweetest memory behind her, for human charity, and an elf-like gift of loveliness.

HIS CLIENT’S CASE

The “Personal Reminiscences” of the late Mr. Justice Ganthony, now in process of being edited, are responsible for the following drollery:—

My first “chambers” were on the top, not to say the attic, floor of a house in (the now defunct) Furnival’s Inn. I called it “chambers,” in the plural, on the strength of a coal-cellar, in the window-seat, and a turn-up bedstead which became a cupboard by day. That accounted for two rooms, and “the usual offices,” as the house-agents say, when they refer to a kitchen six feet by eight in the basement. Trousers, after all, are only one garment, although they are called a pair.

There I sat among the cobwebs, like a spider, and waited for my first brief. In the meanwhile, I lived as the spiders do—on hope, flavoured with a little attic salt. It was not a cheering repast; but, such as it was, there was no end to it. By and by I was almost convinced (of what I had been friendlily advised) that it was a forlorn hope—the sort that leads to glory and the grave; probably by starvation. A spider has always, as a last resource, his web to roll up and devour. I ate up my chambers by degrees; that is to say, I dined, figuratively, day in day out, at the sign of the Three Balls. But this was to consume my own hump, like the camel. When that should be all gone, what next? There is a vulgar expression for prog, which is “belly-timber.” I only realized its applicability to my own case when my chairs and tables, and other furniture, had gone the primrose way of digestion. It was the brass fender, a “genuine antique,” that sat heaviest on my chest.

Furnival’s Inn was not a cheerful place to starve in. There was an atmosphere of gloom and decay about it, which derived, no doubt, from its former dealings in Chancery. In the days of its prosperity it had fed the Inns of Court, as Winchester feeds New College; in my time it could not feed itself. The rats were at it, and the bugs, which are the only things I know of that can thrive on crumbling plaster. I had the distinction of providing some of their rare debauches to the latter; but that was before I began to crumble myself. Some of my blood was certainly incorporated in the ancient walls, and was included in their downfall.

My view, from Furnival’s Inn, was dismally introspective. It commanded, in the first place, a quadrangle of emptiness; and included, in the second, an array of lowering and mouldy tenements like my own, at whose stark windows hungry expectant faces would glimmer fitfully, and scan the yard for the clients who never came, and disappear.

There was a decrepit inn, of another and the social type, budded, like a vicious intestinal growth, within Furnival’s. I used to speculate, as I looked down at night on its tottering portico, and solemn old frequenters, and the lights blinking behind its blinds like corpse-candles, if it were not a half-way house of call for the dead. For, by day, all business seemed withdrawn from it, and its upper rooms might have been mortuaries for any life they exhibited. No cheery housemaid ever looked from their windows to chaff the amorous Boots below. There was none to chaff. The dead need no boots.

Furnival’s Inn had one gullet, by which the roar of the world came in from Holborn. Little else came in but tradesmen, and bailiffs, and an occasional policeman in a thoughtful archæological mood. But the gullet was a vent as much of exit as of entrance; and by it one could escape from the madness of ghostly isolation, and mingle with the world, and look in the pastry-cooks’ windows. Whenever I was moved to one of these chameleonic foraging expeditions, I would pin a ticket on my door: “Called away. Please leave message with housekeeper,” and light my pipe with it when I returned. I wonder if any one ever read the fatuous legends? To Hope’s eyes, I am sure, they must have been dinted, like phonographic records, with the echoes of all the footsteps that ever sounded on the stairs during my absences.

Those footsteps! How they marked the measure of my desperation! They were not many, and they were far between; but not one in all the dreary tale ever reached my attic. Why should they, indeed? I am free to acknowledge its moral inaccessibility. Jurisprudence does not, in its convincing phases, inhabit immediately under the roof. The higher one lives, in practice, the lower one’s practice is like to be. The law is not an elevating pursuit.

I recognized this in the end; and the moment I recognized it I got my first client.

One November evening, very depressed at last, I was sitting smoking, and ruminating over my doleful fate, and thinking if I had not better shut myself up for good and all in the bed-cupboard, when I heard steps enter the hall below. My ears pricked, of course, from force of habit, and from force of habit I uttered a scornful stage laugh—for the withering of Fortune, if she happened to be by. But, in spite of my scorn, the steps, ignoring the architects’ offices on the ground floor (Frost and Driffel, contractors for Castles in Spain), ascended and continued to ascend—past the deed-engrosser’s closet on the half-way landing; past the empty chambers immediately below mine (whence, on gusty nights, the tiny creaking of the rope, by which the last tenant had hanged himself from a beam, would speak through the floor under my bed), and higher yet, right up to my door.

Hope, dying on a pallet up three flights of stairs, sprang alert on the instant. It might be a friend, a creditor, the housekeeper: something telepathic, flowing through the panels, assured me that it was none of these things. Tap-tap! so smart on the woodwork that it made me jump. I swept pipes and tobacco into a drawer. “Come in!” I cried. Then, as the visitor entered, “John, throw up the window a little! O, bother the boy! he’s out.”

I don’t know if the new-comer was imposed on. He nodded and sniffed.

“Tobacco!” he exclaimed. “What an age since I’ve tasted it! Mr. Ganthony, I presume?”

I bowed.

“Barrister-at-law?”

I bowed again. My plate was in the hall to inform him.

“Accept my instructions for a brief.”

He stated it so abruptly that it took my breath away. If all this was outside procedure, I was not going to quarrel with my bread and butter. I motioned him to a chair, and, taking up pen and paper tentatively, was in a position to scrutinize my visitor.

His appearance was certainly odd—a marked exaggeration, I should have pronounced it, of the legal type. His face was very red; his enormous side-whiskers very white. Large spectacles obscured his eyes, and he wore his silk hat (of an obsolete pattern) cocked rakishly over one of them. Add to this that his voluminous frock-coat looked like a much larger man’s misfit; that his black cotton gloves were preposterously long in the fingers; that he carried a “gamp” of the pantomime pattern, and it will be obvious that I had some reason for my astonishment. But I kept that in hand. A lawyer, after all, must come to graduate in the eccentricities of clients.

He looked perkily, with an abrupt action of his head, round about him; then came to me again.

“Large practice?” he asked.

“Large enough for my needs,” I answered winningly.

“H’m!” He sniffed. “They don’t appear to be many.”

“That—excuse me—is my affair,” I said with dignity.

“Of course,” he said; “of course. Only I looked you up—accident serving intuition—on the supposition that you were green, you know—one of the briefless ones—called to the Bar, but not chosen, eh?”

I plumped instantly for frankness.

“You are my first retainer,” I said.

His manner changed at once. He pulled his chair a little nearer me, with an eager motion.

“Thats what I wanted,” he said. “That’s it. The sort that are suffering to win their spurs. None of your egregious old-stagers, who require their briefs to be endorsed to the tune of three figures before they’ll move—‘monkey’-in-the-slot men, I call ’em. Thinks I to myself, Here’s the sort that’ll be willing to take up a case on spec’.”

My enthusiasm shot down to zero.

“O!” I said, with a falling face; “on speculation!”

“There’s a fortune in it for a clever advocate,” he answered eagerly. “A fortune! all Pactolus in a nutshell. I’ve had my experiences of the other kind. They squeeze you, and throw you away; take the wages of sin, and hand you over to the deuce. What do you say?”

“If you will give me the particulars,” I answered, without heart, “I shall be able to judge better. Your client——?”

He laughed joyously; frowned; put his hat on the floor; crossed his arms over his umbrella-handle, and glowered ferociously at me, squinting through his glasses.

“Exactly,” he said; “my client, ha-ha! Here, then, young sir, is my client’s case.

“His name is Buggins” (I glanced involuntarily at the wall). “He is, or was, until envy combined with detraction to ruin him, a company-promoter. As such, his trend was always towards insurance. It offered the best opportunities to a great creative genius. Buggins, being all that, recognized the still amazing potentialities in a field of commerce, which, though much worked, remains unexhausted—almost, one might say, inexhaustible. In his younger days he showed a pretty invention in devising and engineering what I may call personal essays in this line. His Insurance against Waterspouts, which he worked principally in the Midlands, brought him some handsome returns with a single generation of farmers. It was based on a cloud-burst at Bethesda, in Wales, which ruined quite a number. Other flights of his immature genius were, respectively, Insurance against Death in Diving-bells; against Death of a Broken Heart; against Official Strangulation; against Non-fatal Disfiguration by Lightning; against Death by Starvation (this last was largely patronized by millionaires). On a somewhat higher plane were his Provident Dipsomaniary, whose policies matured, or ‘burst,’ as Buggins phrased it, at the age of eighty-five, an essential condition being that the holders must put in their claims in person; his Physical Promotion League, which guaranteed to pay to the parents of any child, insured in it during his teens, a sum of ten pounds on the child’s reaching twenty-five years of age and a minimum height of six feet, and a thousand pounds for every additional inch which it grew afterwards; his Anti-Fiction Mutual, whose policies were forfeitable on first conviction of having written a novel (this proved one of the most profitable of all Buggins’s enterprises for a time; but in the end the national malady proved incurable, and subscribers fell off); his Psychical Pocket Research Society, which offered an Insurance against Ghost-seeing, the policy-holder forfeiting his claim on proof of his first supernatural visitation (but this was so violently assailed by the opposition society, which offered to prove that there were not three people in the United Kingdom who were insusceptible to spooks, that the scheme had to be abandoned); finally, in this category, his Bachelors’ Protection Association, which provided that, if a member reached the age of ninety without having married, he should receive an annuity beginning at fifty pounds, and rising, by yearly increments of ten pounds, to ten thousand pounds—figures which, in a centenarian age, were successful in dazzling a great many.

“But, by then, Buggins was beginning to master the deep ethics of his trade, and to realize that its heaviest emoluments were rooted in the grand principle of profitable self-denial. People will be unselfish if they see money in it; you can’t stop ’em.

“One other notable venture marks this period of what I may call his moral transition. That was his inspired scheme for insuring against illness, in the sense that any policy-holder admitting him or herself to be seriously indisposed, lost the right to compensation. It would have proved a godsend in a neurotic age; but the antagonism of the entire medical profession, with the single exception of the officer appointed by the company, killed it.

“We come now to Buggins’s final matured achievements. I beg your pardon?”

I had said nothing; but I suppose there is such a thing as a “speaking” silence. Certainly, if I had looked as I felt, I was a more drivelling maniac by now than Buggins himself. The visitor seemed to shoot out his eyes like an angry crab.

“Young man, young man!” he said warningly, “I begin to be suspicious that, after all, I may be misplacing my confidence.”

He looked banefully into his hat, where it stood rim upwards on the floor; then, suddenly overwrought, kicked it fiercely across the room. The action seemed to restore him to complete urbanity. He smiled.

“So perish all Buggins’s enemies!” he said loftily; “and hail the grand climacteric!”

He pinned me, like a live butterfly, to the wall behind me with a fixed and penetrating gaze.

“What would you say,” he said quietly, “to an Insurance against Brigandage, available to all travelling in Sicily or the Balkans, and realizable” (his watchfulness was intense) “on the receipt, at the head-offices in the Shetland Islands, of a nose, ear, or other organ, attested, under urgency, by the nearest consul, to be the personal property of the applicant desiring a ransom?”

He paused significantly. “I should say,” I responded drivellingly, “that, as a feat of pure inspiration, it—it takes the cake.”

“Ah!” He shouted it, and sprang to his feet joyously. “You are the man for me! You justify my confidence, as the returns justified Buggins’s daring conception. Would you believe it: within the first few months, bushels of noses were received at the head-offices, every one of which Buggins had no difficulty in proving to be false! But, hush! stay!—there was to be a higher flight!”

He had been pacing riotously up and down. Now he flounced to a stop before me, and held me once more with his glittering eye.

“It took the form,” he whispered, “of a Purgatory Mutual, on the Tontine principle, the last out to take the pool!”

I rose, trembling, to my feet, as he burst into a violent fit of laughter.

“It was that,” he shouted, as he set to racing up and down again, “which let loose the dogs of envy, spite, and slander. They called him mad—him, Buggins, mad, ha-ha! It was the fools themselves were mad. He ignored their clamour; his vast brain was yet busy with immortal conceptions; he matured a scheme against Death from Flying-machines” (here he tore off one whisker and threw it into the fireplace); “he did more—he personally tested the theory of aerostatics” (here he tore off the other whisker, and stamped on it). “Too great, too absorbed, he never noticed that the unstable engine had landed him in the grounds of a private asylum, and, relieved of his weight, had soared away again. The attendants came; they seized and immured him; they would not believe his assurances that he was a perfect stranger. From that day to this, when fortuitous circumstances enabled him to escape, he has appealed to their justice, their humanity, in vain.”

Again he stopped before me, and, flinging his spectacles in my face, rent open the breast of his coat.

“Know me at last for what I am!” he yelled. “I am Buggins, and I appoint you my advocate in the action I am about to bring against the Commissioners of Lunacy!”

The door opened softly, and a masculine face peered round the edge. Its scrutiny appearing satisfactory, it was followed by the whole of an official form, which, in its entering, revealed another, large and passionless, standing behind it.

“Now, Mr. Buggins,” said the first, “we’re a-waitin’ for you to take up your cue.”

The visitor whipped round, started, chuckled, and, to my relief and surprise, responded rather abjectly.

“All right, Johnson,” he said. “I just slipped out between the acts for a whiff of fresh air.”

“Well,” said the man, “you must be quick and come along, or you’ll spile the play.”

He went quite tamely, and the second official outside received him stolidly into custody. Mate number one lingered to touch his cap to me and explain.

“Flyborough Asylum, sir. They give him a part in some private theatricals, and he tuk advantage of his disguise as a family lawyer to hook it between the acts. None of us reco’nized him, or guessed what he’d done, till the time come for him to take up his cue; and then, with the prompter howling for him and him not answering, the truth struck us of a heap.”

I was down in my chair, flabby and gasping.

“But what brought him to me?” I groaned.

“Train, sir,” answered the man; “plenty of ’em, and easy to catch from the suburbs. Why he come on here? Why, his offices in the old days was in Furnival’s; it were that give us the clue. I suppose, now” (he took off his cap, took a red handkerchief from it, thoughtfully mopped his forehead, and returned the bandana to its nest), “I suppose, now, he’s been a-gammoning of you pretty high with his insurances? His fust principle in life was always to play upon fools.”

AN ABSENT VICAR

“Exactly,” said the Reverend Septimus Prior; “the exchange was the most fortuitous, not to say the most fortunate” (he gave a little giggle and bow) “possible. Your uncle saw my advertisement, answered it, and for a brief period he goes to my cure, and I come to his.”

“Well, if you feel certain,” said Miss Robin, regretfully resting in her lap the novel she was reading.

Mr. Prior sipped his tea and nibbled his rusk. In the intervals between, he would occasionally glance at the portrait of a scholarly cleric, with a thin grim mouth and glassy eyes, which bantered him from the wall opposite.

“Your uncle—Mr. Fearful?” he had once ventured to ask; and the niece had answered, “Yes. It is very like him.”

Now he paused, with his cup half-way to his mouth.

“I beg your pardon?” he exclaimed.

Miss Robin put her book to her lips, and looking over it—really rather charmingly,—yawned behind the cover. She was surprisingly dégagée for a country vicar’s niece—self-collected, and admirably pretty; though her openwork stockings, which she did not hesitate to cross her legs to display, filled him with a weak sense of entanglement in some unrighteous mystery.

“You said?” he invited her.

“I said, If you feel certain,” she repeated calmly.

“Ah!” he said. “Yes. You mean?”

“I mean,” she said, without a ruffle, “that Uncle Philip may have settled to swap livings with you pro tem., and may have started off to take yours, and may have got there—if you feel certain that he has.”

“To be sure,” he answered. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“Had he arrived—when you started—for here?”

“No. Certainly he hadn’t arrived. My train was due. I had to leave a message; but——”

She stopped him by dropping her book into her lap; and, clasping one knee in her hands, conned him amiably.

“Did he lead you to expect a niece among the charges he was committing to your care—or cure?” she asked.

“Well, I must confess,” said the young man, blushing, “he—ah! mentioned a housekeeper—Mrs. Gaunt, I think—but——”

“No, of course not,” she interrupted him. “He had forgotten all about me.”

Mr. Prior gasped, and looked down. This was his first holiday exchange of livings—an unsophisticated venture, which he was already half repenting. A suburban cure; a desire for fresh pastures; a daring resolution; an advertisement in the “Church Times”; a prompt answer; as prompt an acceptance (after due reference to the Clergy List); a long railway journey; a tramp, relatively as long, to a remote parsonage on the road to a seaport; an arrival in the dark; an innocence of all expectation of, or preparation for him; an explanation; production of his written voucher, and—here he was, accepted, he could not but think, on sufferance. But there he thought wrong. Miss Robin was not near so upset by his appearance as he was.

“He comes and goes” (she said of Uncle Philip) “without reference to anybody or anything. We never know what he’ll do next, or who’ll introduce himself into the house as his friend. It may be a burglar or a pirate for all we know. All sorts of strange people come up from the port, and are shown into my uncle’s room, and out again by himself at the side door. At least, I suppose so. We never know what becomes of them, or what’s going on, any more than I doubt he does himself. I dare say they fleece him nicely; and—you may laugh—but when he’s in his absent moods, you might undress him without his knowing. Only he’d probably strike you to the ground when he found out—he’s such an awful temper.”

“Dear me!” murmured the young man; “how very curious. One hears of such cases.”

“Does one?” said Miss Robin. “I’d rather hear of, than live with them, anyhow; and in a desert, too. It wouldn’t so much matter if he didn’t always hold others to blame for his mistakes and mislayings. He kept me in bed a week once, because he’d read right through a treatise on explosives in the pulpit, before he discovered that it wasn’t his peace-thanksgiving sermon.”

“Astonishing!” said Mr. Prior; then added, with a faint smile, “Well, I can promise you, at least, that I’m not a pirate.”

“No,” she said, “I can see you’re not. Won’t you have some more tea?”

He was shown to his bedroom by Mrs. Gaunt, who was a stony, silent woman, bleak with mystery. All night the wind howled round the lonely building; and the unhappy man, who, in a phase of worldly revolt, egged on by a dare-devil parishioner, had once read “The House on the Marsh”, thought of Sarah and Mr. Rayner, and of a silent weaving of strings across the stairway in the dark to catch him tripping should he venture upon escape.

He arose, feverish, to a sense of hooting draughts in a grey house, and went to matins in the gaunt dull church, which stood as lonely as a shepherd’s hut on a slope hard by. There was nothing in sight but wind-torn pastures, and, all around, little graves, which seemed trying vainly to tuck themselves and their shivering epitaphs under the grass. There appeared nothing in the world to attract a congregation; but, as a matter of fact, there were a few old frosted spinsters present, of that amphibious order, a sort of landcrabs, which forgathers on the neutral wastes between sea and country.

Mr. Prior went back to his dreary breakfast at the Vicarage. His lady hostess, it appeared, was wont to lie late abed, and did not think it worth her while to alter her habits for him. The meal, however, had been served and left to petrify, pending his return from matins. It was with a consciousness of congealed bacon-fat, insufficiently dissolved by lukewarm tea, sticking to the roof of his mouth, that he rose from it, and pondered his next movement. No one came near him. He looked dismally out on a weedy drive. He rather wished Miss Robin would condescend to his company. He was no pirate, certainly; but he believed he would brave, had braved already, much for his cloth. She had beautiful eyes—clear windows, he was sure, to a virginal soul. But then, the other end! the white feet peeping through that devil’s lattice! He tried to recall any authority in Holy Writ for openwork stockings. Certainly pilgrims went barefoot, and half a loaf was better than no bread.

“This will not do, Septimus,” he said, weakly striking his breast. “I will go and compose my sermon.”

He stepped into the hall. It was papered in cold blue and white marble, with a mahogany umbrella stand, and nothing else, to temper its tomb-like austerity. At the further end was a baize door of a faded strawberry colour.

He was entitled to the run of the house, he concluded. There had been no mention of any Bluebeard chamber. But, then, to be sure, there had been no mention of a niece. The association of ideas tingled him. What if he should turn the handle and alight on Miss Robin?

He flipped his breast again, frowning, and strode to the baize door. Beside it, he now observed, a passage went off to the kitchens. Desperately he pulled the door, found a second, of wood, beyond it, opened that also, and found himself in what was obviously the Vicar’s study.

Obviously, that is to say, to his later conceptions of his correspondent. Otherwise he might have taken it for the laboratory of a scientist. It was lined with bookcases, sparsely volumed; but five out of every six shelves were thronged with jars, instruments, and engines of a terrifying nature. In one place was a curtained recess potential with unholiness. Prints of discomposing organs hung on the walls. Immemorial dust blurred everything. There was a pedestalled desk in the middle, and opposite it, hung with a short curtain, a half-glazed door which the intruder, tiptoeing thither and peeping, with his heart at the gallop, found to lead into a dismal narrow lane which communicated with the road. He returned to the desk, which, frankly open, seemed to invite him to its use, and was pondering the moral practicability of composition in the midst of such surroundings, when a voice at his ear almost made him jump out of his skin.

“Pardon me, sir; but have you the master’s permission to use this room?”

Mrs. Gaunt had come upon him without a sound.

“Dear me, madam!” he said, wiping his forehead. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, sir,” she said, in her stony, colourless way, “that this room is interdict to both great and little, now and always, unless he makes an exception in your favour.”

“There was no specific mention of it, certainly,” said Mr. Prior, “neither for nor against. I concluded that the use of a study was not debarred me.”

“Pardon me,” she repeated monotonously. “I believe you concluded wrong, sir.”

“The door was not locked.”

“There are some prohibitions,” she said, “that need no locks.”

The inference was fearful.

“Miss June” (ecstatic name!) “and I,” she said, “have never dared so much as to put our noses inside, and not a word spoken to forbid it.”

Mr. Prior, to his own astonishment, revolted. Smarting, perhaps, under the memory of some suspected covert innuendo in a certain silvery acquiescence in a statement of his made last night, he revolted. He would prove that he could be a pirate if he chose.

“I shall stop here,” he said, trembling all over. “There was no embargo laid, and I must have somewhere to write my sermon.”

“Of course,” said a voice; and Miss Robin stood in the doorway—the most enchanting morning vision, her eyes bright with curiosity.

“I am delighted you support me,” he said, kindling and advancing.

She still looked beside and around him.

“Do you know,” she said, “it is perfectly true. I have not once dared to venture in here before, though never actually told not to. But that is all one, I think. What an extraordinary litter!”

She had not ventured! and with the inducement of her petrifying surroundings! She was uninquisitive, then—“an excellent thing in woman.”

“Since there is no veto,” he said, incomparably audacious, “supposing we explore together?”

She looked at him admiringly.

“I should like to.” She hesitated.

“June!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.

“And I will,” said the girl.

But the housekeeper, content, it appeared, with her protest, stood, not uninterested in the subsequent investigation.

“Do you not find all this a little remote, a little lifeless sometimes, Miss Robin?” said the clergyman, greatly daring.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Eels get used to skinning. It’s not life, of course. But I have to make the best of it, and there’s no help.”

“Ah, yes, there is!” said her companion, intending to imply the spiritual, but half hoping she would construe it into the material consolation.

“What do you mean?” she asked simply.

“Why,” he said, stammering and blushing furiously, and giving away his case at once, “with your youth, and—and beauty—O, forgive me! I am a little confused.”

“Where do you live?” she said, fixing him with her large eyes.

“At Clapton,” he murmured.

“It sounds most joyous,” she said, clasping her hands.

Hardly knowing what he did, he pulled the curtain away from the recess by which they stood, and instantly staggered back. The housekeeper, who, foreseeing his act, had crept up inquisitively behind, gave a mortal gasp, and Miss Robin a faint shriek—for, stretched lifeless and livid on a couch within, lay the stark body of a man.

For a minute they all stood staring, frozen with horror; then Mrs. Gaunt began to wring her hands.

“It is the same,” she cried, in awful tones. “I remember him—the dark foreigner. He wandered up here from the port a week ago; and I took him in to the master, and he never came out again. I thought he had let him go by the door there into the lane. O, woe on this fearful house! Long have I suspected and long dreaded. The sounds, and the awful, awful smells!”

“Perhaps,” whispered the girl, gulping, and clutching at her breast, “he died unexpectedly, and uncle put him away here, and forgot all about him.”

Mrs. Gaunt shrieked, and seizing the clergyman’s arm, pointed—

“Look! Pickled babies—one, two, three! And bones! And a fish-kettle! It is all plain. He kills them, and boils them down for his experiments, and by an accident he forgot to empty his larder—his larder! hoo-hoo!—before he went!”

She broke into hysteric laughter and gaspings. Miss Robin, whinnying, tottered quite close up to the young man, who stood shivering and speechless.

“What can we do to save him?” she whimpered. “Mr. Prior, say something!”

Thus urged, the unhappy young man strove to press his brain into a focus with his hand, and to rally himself to what, he felt, was the supreme occasion of his life. The appealing eyes and parted lips so close to his would have intoxicated a saint, much more a pirate.

“We must warn him—agony column—from returning,” he ejaculated, reeling. “Cryptic address—has he any distinguishing mark?”

“Yes,” she said, with frantic eagerness; “he has a large mole at the root of his nose.”

“Very well,” he said—“something of this sort: ‘Nose, with large mole at root of. All discovered. Don’t return!’ ”

“But what is the use of an advertisement? O, Mr. Prior! what is the use of an advertisement when we know where he is, or ought to be, and can go——?”

“Do you really think he will be there? It was a blind. O, Miss Robin, it is evident now it was a blind to cover his tracks!”

“But why should he have designed to escape at all, leaving this—O, Mr. Prior!—leaving this horror behind him?”

“We can only conjecture—O, Miss Robin, we can only conjecture! Perhaps because of his conscience overtaking him; perhaps because, killing in haste, he discovered at leisure that it would not go into the kettle; perhaps in a phase of that deadly absence of mind, which, he will have realized by now, the Lord has converted to his confusion.”

“Well, if you are right. And in the meantime we must get rid of this—somehow. O, pray think of a means! Do! Do!”

Mrs. Gaunt steadied her storming breast as she leaned for support, with hanging head, against the door.

“There’s the old well—off the lane,” she panted, without looking up. “He there might have fallen in—as he went out—and none have guessed it to this day.”

It was a fearful inspiration. Mr. Prior, in that moment of supreme sentient exaltation, abandoned himself to the awful rapture of things.

“June!” he whispered, putting shaking hands on the girl’s shoulders; “if I do this thing for your sake, will you—will you—I have a mother—this is no longer a place for you—come to Clapton?”

“Yes,” she answered, offering to nestle to him. “I had supposed that was understood.”

He was a little taken aback.

“We must move this first,” he said, wringing his damp forehead. “Who—who will help me?”

It was really heroic of him. In a shuddering group, they approached together the terrible thing—hesitated—plunged, and dragged it out with a sickening flop on the floor.

A greasy turban, which it wore, rolled away, disclosing a near bald head. Its eyes were closed; its teeth grinned through a fluff of dark hair; a lank frock-coat embraced its body, linen puttees its shanks, and at the end were stiff bare feet.

“Look, and see if the coast is clear,” gasped the clergyman.

Miss Robin turned to obey, and uttered a startled shriek.

“What are you doing with my Senassee?” cried a terrible voice at the door.

Mr. Prior whipped round, echoing his beloved’s squawk. A fierce old man, leaning on a stick, stood glaring in the opening.

“Uncle!” cried the girl.

He advanced, sneering and caustic, pushed them all rudely aside, dropped on his knees beside the corpse, and, thrusting his finger forcibly into its mouth, appeared to hook and roll its tongue forward. Instantly an amazing transformation occurred. A convulsion shook the body; life flowed into its drab cheeks; its eyes opened and rolled; inarticulate sounds came from its jaws.

“Ha!” cried the old man; “I have foreclosed on these busybodies.”

Then he rose to his feet, leaving the patient yawning and stretching on the floor.

“Fearful!” gasped the clergyman.

“Do you address me, sir?” asked the old man, scowling.

“Conjurer!” whispered Mr. Prior.

“If you like,” snarled the other. “It is a common enough trick with these Yogis, but one I had never seen until he came my way and offered to show it me for a consideration. I had forgot he was still lying there when I agreed to exchange livings with you. (You are Mr. Prior, I presume?) It was the merest oversight, which I remembered on my way, and came back by an early train to rectify—none too soon, it seems, for the staying of meddlesome fingers.”

“Forgot he was there!” cried Mr. Prior.

“And what if I did, sir?” snapped the other. “It was a full week he had lain tranced; and let me tell you, sir, I have more things to think of in a week than your mind could accommodate in a century. Why,” he cried, in sudden enlightenment, “I do believe the fools imagined I had murdered the man.”

“Look at the babies in the bottles!” cried Mrs. Gaunt hysterically.

“As to you, you old ass,” shouted the Vicar, flouncing round, “if you can’t distinguish embryo simiadæ from babies, you’d better call yourself Miss, as I believe you are!”

“I give notice on the spot!” cried Mrs. Gaunt.

Miss Robin stepped up bravely to the young clergyman, and linked her arm in his.

“And I,” she said. “I think you have behaved very cruelly to me, to us all, Uncle, and—and Mr. Prior has a mother.”

“I dare say; he seems fool enough for anything,” roared the old gentleman. “Go back to her, sir! Go to——”

June shrieked.

“Clapton!” he shouted, “and take this baggage with you!”

THE BREECHES BISHOP

In that age of gallantry, the reign of Charles the Second, it was customary when a gentleman drank a lady’s health to throw some part of his dress into the flames, in order to do her still greater honour. This was well enough for a lover, but the folly did not stop here, for his companions were obliged to follow him in this proof of his veneration by consuming a similar article, whatever it might be.

About the latter part of the seventeenth century, there was living at Aldersferry, in the Soke of Godsport in Hampshire, a worthy clergyman of the name of Barnabas Winthrop. The little living of St. Ascham’s—a perpetual curacy in the Archdeaconry of Winchester—supplied the moral and material needs of this amiable man; his granddaughter, Miss Joan Seabird, kept house for him; and never were cream and ripe fruit happier in contact than were these two playful and reasonable intellects in their relations of child and sage.

A hysteromaniac, however, is Fortune, who, charmed for a while with the simplicity of these her protégés, soon began to construe their contentment into self-sufficiency, and to devise some means to correct their supposed presumption on her favour, by putting it into the head of the artless divine how silence on questions which one felt called loudly for reform might be comfortable, but was shameful and an evasion of one’s duty. In short, Dr. Winthrop, entertaining original views on sanitation and the prevention of epidemics, was wickedly persuaded by her to expound them, and so to invite into his harmless Eden the snake which was to demoralize it. In one day he became a pamphleteer.

Now the Plague, in that year of 1682, was not so remote a memory but that people lived in a constant terror of its recrudescence. Pandects, treatises, expositions, containing diagnoses, palladiums and schemes of quarantine, all based on the most orthodox superstitions, did not cease to pour from the press, to the eternal confusion of an age which was yet far from realizing the pious schism of the aide-toi. What, then, as might be supposed, was the effect on it, when a clergyman of the Establishment was seen to enter the arena as a declared dissenter from the fata obstant of popular bigotry?

For a time Godsport, startled and scandalized, watched aloof the paper warfare; and it was not until after the appearance of the Doctor’s tract, “De omni re Scibili”—wherein he sought, boldly and definitely, and withal with a characteristic humour, to lay the responsibility for pestilence, not upon the Almighty’s shoulders, but, literally, at the doors of men, at their face-to-face proximity, and at “the Castynge of Noisome filth in their neare neighbourhood”—that it brought down its official hand with a weight and suddenness which shook St. Ascham’s to its roots. In brief, there was flung at the delinquent one morning his formal citation to the Sessions Court, there to answer upon certain charges of having “in divers Tracts, Opuscules and Levrets, sought insidiously to ingrafte the minds of his Majesty’s liege subjects with such impudent heresies as that it is in the power of man to limit the visitations of God—a very pestilent doctrine, and one arrogating to His servants the Almighty’s high and beneficent prerogatives; inasmuch as Plague and Fire and other His scourges, being sacriligeously wrested from His graspe, the world would waxe blown with overlife, till it crawled upon the face of the heavens like a gross putrid cheese.”

Under this bolt from the blue the liberal minds of grandsire and child sank amazed for the moment, only to rally to a consciousness of the necessity for immediate action.

“Up, wench!” cried the Doctor, “and saddle our Pinwire. I will go lay my case instanter before the Bishop.”

“Alas, dearest!” answered the weeping girl, “you forget; he is this long while bedridden.”

Her imagination, which had been wont secretly to fondle the idea of her grandfather’s enlightened piety rewarded with a bishopric, pictured it in a moment turned to his confusion, and himself, perhaps, through the misrepresentations of a blockhead Corporation, disgraced and beggared in his old age. But, though she knew the Churchman, she had not calculated the rousing effects of criticism on the author.

“Then,” roared he, “I will seek the fount itself of reason and justice. It was a good treatise, a well-argued treatise; and the King shall decide upon the practical merits of his own English.”

“The King!” she cried, clasping her hands.

“The King,” he answered. “Know you not that he moves daily between Southampton, where he lies, and Winchester, where he builds? We will go to Winchester. Nay, we, child; blubber not; for who knows but that, the shepherd being withdrawn, the wolves might think to practise on the lamb.”

He checked himself, and hung his head.

“The Lord pardon and justify me indignation,” he muttered. “I was a priest before an author.”

It was fine, but a loaded sky, when they set forth upon their journey of twenty or so miles, Joan riding pillion behind her grandfather on the sober red nag. After much cross work over villainous tracks, they were got at last into the Southampton turnpike, when they were joined by a single horseman, riding a handsome barb, who, with a very favourable face for Joan, pulled alongside of them, as they jogged on, and fell into easy talk.

“Dost ride to overtake a bishopric, master clergyman,” says he, “that you carry with you such a sweet bribe for preferment?”

Joan looked up, softly panting. Could he somehow have got wind already of their mission, and have taken them by the way to forestall it? But her eyes fell again before the besieging gaze of the cavalier.

He was a swart man of fifty or so, with a rather sooty expression, and his under-lip stuck out. His eyes, bagging a little in the lower lids, smouldered half-shut, between lust and weariness, under the blackest brows; and, for the rest, he was dressed as black as the devil, with a sparkle of diamonds here and there in his bosom. Joan looked down breathless.

“I seek no preferment, sir, but a reasonable justice,” said the curate; and, in a little, between this and that, had ingenuously, though with a certain twinkling eye for the humour of it all, confessed his whole case to the stranger. But Joan uttered not a word.

The cavalier laughed, then frowned mightily for a while. “We will indict these petty rogues of office on a quo warranto,” he growled. “What! does not ‘cleanness of body proceed from a due reverence of God’? Go on, sir, and I will promise you the King’s consideration.”

Then he forgot his indignation, leering at the girl again.

“And what is your business with Charles, pretty flower?” said he.

But, before she could answer, whish! went Pinwires’s girth out of its buckle, and parson and girl tumbled into the road.

The cavalier laughed out, and, while the Doctor was ruefully readjusting his straps, offered his hand to the girl.

“Come, sweetheart,” said he. “Since we go a common road, shalt mount behind me, and equal the odds between your jade and my greater beast.”

Joan appealed in silence to her grandfather.

“Verily, sir,” he said nodding and smiling, “it would be a gracious and kindly act.”

In a moment she was mounted, with her white arms belted about the stranger’s waist; the next, he had put quick spurs to his horse, and was away with a rush and clatter.

For an instant the Doctor failed to realize the nature of the abduction; and then of a sudden he was dancing and bawling in a sheer frenzy.

“Dog! Ravisher! Halt! Stop him! Detain him!”

He saw the flight disappear round a bend in the road. It was minutes before his shaking hands could negotiate strap and buckle, and enable him to follow in pursuit. But he carried no spurs, and Pinwire, already over-ridden, floundered in his steps. Distraught, dumbfounded, the old man was crying to himself, when he came upon Joan sitting by the roadside. He tumbled off, she jumped up, and they fell upon one another’s neck.

“O, a fine King, forsooth!” she cried, sobbing and fondling him. “O, a fine King!”

“Who? What?” said he.

“Why, it was the King himself!”

“The King!”

“The King.”

“How?” he gasped. “You have never seen him?”

“Trust a woman,” quoth she.

“A woman!” he cried. “You are but half a one yet.”

“It was the King, nevertheless.”

“Joan, let us turn back.”

“He had a wooing voice, grandfather.”

“Retro Satanas! How did you give him the slip?”

“We were stayed by a cow, the dear thing, and like an eel I slid off.”

“Dear Joan!”

“He commanded me to mount again, laughing all the while, and vowing he’d carry me back to you. But I held away, and he said such things of my beauty.”

“That proves him false.”

“Does it? But of course it does, since you say so. And while he was a-wheedling in that voice, I just whipt this from my hair on a thought, and gave his beast a vicious peck with it.”

She showed a silver pin like a skewer.

“Admirable!” exclaimed her grandfather.

“It was putting fire to powder,” she said. “It just gave a bound and was gone. If its rider pulls up this side of Christmas, I’ll give him——”

“What, woman?”

“Lud! I’ve come of age, in a minute. And it’s beginning to pour, grandfather; and where are we?”

He looked about him in the dolefullest way.

“If I knew!” he sighed. “We must e’en seek the shelter of an inn till this storm is by, and then return home. Better any bankruptcy than that of honour, Joan.”

They remounted and jogged on in the rain, which by now was falling heavily. The tired little horse, feeling the weight of his own soaked head, began to hang it and cough. Presently they dismounted at a wayside byre, and, eating the simple luncheon which their providence had provided, dwelt on a little in hopes of the weather clearing. But it grew steadily worse.

“I have lost my bearings,” said the clergyman in a sudden amazement. “We must push on.”

About four o’clock, being seven miles or so short of Winchester, they came down upon a little stream which bubbled across the road. The groaning horse splashed into it and stood still. Dr. Winthrop, wakened by the pause from a brown reverie, whipped his right leg over the beast’s withers, landed, slipped on a stone, and sat down in two feet of water. Uttering a startled ejaculation, he scrambled up, a sop to the very waist of his homespun breeches. Their points—old disused laces, fragrant from Joan’s bodice—clung weeping to his calves. He waded out, cherishing above water-mark the sodden skirts of his coat, his best, of ‘Colchester bayze.’ The horse, sensibly lightened, followed.

“O, O!” cried Joan. “Wasn’t you sopped enough already, but you must fill your pockets with water?”

“Joan!” he cried disconcerted. “I am drowned!”

Luckily, in that pass, looking up the slope of the hill, they espied near the top a toll-booth, and, beyond, the first houses of a village. Making a little glad haste, they were soon at the bar.

The woman who came to take their money looked hard at the tired girl. She was of a sober cast, and her close-fitting coif showed her of the non-conforming order.

“For Winchester, master?” said she.

“Nay,” answered the clergyman; “for the first hostelry. We are beat, dame.”

“The first and the last is ‘The Five Alls,’ ” said she. “But I wouldn’t carry the maiden there, by your leave. There be great and wild company in the house, that recks nothing of anything in its cups. Canst hear ’em, if thou wilt.” And, indeed, with her words, a muffled roar of merriment reached them from the inn a little beyond.

“One riding for Winchester, and the rest from,” she said, “they met here, and here have forgathered roistering this hour. Dare them so you dare. I have spoken.”

“Nunc Deus avertat!” cried the desperate minister. “The Fates fight against us. At all costs we must go by.”

“Nay,” said the good woman; “but, an you will, seek you your own shelter there, and leave this poor lamb with me. I have two already by the fire—decent ladies and proper, and no quarry for licence. I know the company; ’twill be moving soon; and then canst come and claim thine own.”

He accepted gladly, and, leaving Joan in her charge, rode on to the inn, where, dismounting, he betook himself to the stable, which was full of horses, and, after, to the kitchen.

The landlord, cooking a pan of rashers alone over a great fire, turned his head, focussed the new-comer with one red eye, and asked his business.

“A seat by the hearth, a clothes-rack for my breeches, a rug for my loins while they dry, and a mug of ale with a sop in it,” answered the traveller, with a smile for his own waggish epitome. And then he related of his mishap.

The landlord grunted, returned to his task, blew on an ignited rasher, presently took the skillet off the coals, forked the fizzing mess into a dish, and disappeared with it. All the while an ineffable racket thundered on the floor above.

“Peradventure they will respect my cloth,” thought the clergyman. “The Lord fend me! I am among the Philistines.”

The landlord returned in a moment with a horn of ale in one hand, and a rug in the other, which he threw down.

“Dod, man!” he cried; “peel, peel! This is the country of continence! Hast no reason to fear for thy modesty.” And he went out between chuckling and grumbling.

Very decently the curate doffed his small-clothes, hung them over a trestle before the fire, wrapped and knotted the rug about his loins, and sat down vastly content to his sup. In ten minutes—what with weariness, warmth, and stingo—he was asleep.

He woke with a little shriek, and staggered to his feet. Something had pricked him—the point of a rapier. The flushed, grinning face of the man who had wielded it stood away from him. The kitchen was full of rich company, which broke suddenly into a babble of merriment at the sight of his astounded visage. In the midst, a swart gentleman, who had been lolling at a table, advanced, and taking him by the shoulders, swung him gently to and fro till his eyes goggled.

“Well followed, parson!” said he, chuckling, and lurching a little in his speech. “What! is the cuif not to be spoiled of his bishopric because of a saucy baggage?”

He laughed, checked himself suddenly, and, still holding on, assumed a majestic air, with his wig a little on one side, and said with great dignity: “But, before I grant termsir, you shall bring the slut to canvass of herself what termsir. Godsmylife! to hold her King at a bodkin’s point! It merits no pardon, I say, unless the merit of the pardon of the termsir—no, the pardon of the merit of the termsir. Therefore I say, whither hast brought her, I say? Out with it, man!”

The clergyman, recognizing Joan’s abductor, and listening amazed, sprang back at the end with a face of horror, almost upsetting His Majesty, who, barely recovering himself, stood shaking his head with a glassy smile.

“Ifhicakins!” said he: “I woss a’most down!”

“Avaunt, ravisher!” roared the Doctor.

Charles stiffened with a jerk, stared, wheeled cautiously, and tiptoed elaborately from the room. His suite, staggering at the balance, followed with enormous solemnity; and the Doctor, still pointing denunciatory, was left alone.

At the end of a minute, after much whispering outside, a young cavalier re-entered, and approached him with a threatening visage, as if up the slope of a deck.

“His Maj’ty, sir,” said he, “demands to know if you know who the devil you was a-bawling—hic—at?”

“To my sorrow, though late, I do, sir,” answered the Doctor in a grievous voice.

“O!” said the cavalier, and tacked from the room. He returned again in a second, to poke the clergyman with his finger, and suggest to him confidentially, “Betteric la’ than never—hic!” which having uttered, he took himself off, after a vain attempt to open the door from its hinge side. In two minutes he was back again.

“His Maj’ty wan’s know where hast hidden Mrs. Seabird. Nowhere in house, says landlord. Ver’ well—where then?”

“Tell the King, where he shall reach her only over my body.”

The cavalier vanished, and reappeared.

“His Maj’ty doesn’t wan’ tread on your body. On contrary, wan’s raise you up. Wan’s hear story all over again from lady’s lips.”

“I am His Majesty’s truthful minister. There is nothing to add to what I have already reported to him.”

The cavalier withdrew, smacking his thigh profoundly. Sooner than usual he returned.

“His Maj’ty s’prised at you. Says if you won’t tell him where’ve laid her by, he’ll beat up every house within miles-’n’-miles.”

“No!” said the simple clergyman, in a sudden emotion.

“Yes,” said the gentleman, not too drunk to note his advantage. “For miles-’n’-miles. His Maj’ty ver’ s’prised her behaviour to him. Wan’s lil word with her. Tell at once where she is, or worse for you.”

The clergyman looked about him like one at bay. His glance lighted on the trestle before the fire, fixed itself there, and kindled.

“The Lord justify the ways of His servant!” he muttered; and drew himself up.

“Tell His Majesty,” he said in a strong voice, “that, so be he will honour a toast I shall call, the way he seeks shall be made clear to him.”

The other gave a great chuckle, which was loudly echoed from the passage.

“Why, thish is the right humour,” he said, and retired.

Within a few moments the whole company re-entered, tittering and jogging one another, and spilling wine from the beakers they carried.

The King called a silence.

“Sir,” said the clergyman, advancing a little, “I pray your Majesty to convince me, by proof, of a reputed custom with our gallants, which is that, being to drink a lady’s health, the one that calleth shall cast into the flames some article of his attire, there to be consumed to her honour, and so shall demand of his company, by toasters’ law, that they do likewise.”

“Dod!” said the King, chuckling; “woss he speiring at? Drink man! drink and sacrifice, and I give my royal word that all shall follow suit, though it be with the wigs from our heads.”

The Doctor lifted his horn of ale and drained it.

“I toast Joan!” he cried.

“Joan!” they all shouted, laughing and hiccuping, and, having drunk, threw down their beakers helter-skelter.

The clergyman took one swift step forward; snatched up his small-clothes from the trestle; displayed them a moment; thrust them deep into the blazing coals, and, facing about, disrugged himself, and stood in his shirttails.

“I claim your Majesty’s word, and breeches,” said he.

A silence of absolute stupefaction befell; and then in an instant the kitchen broke into one howl of laughter.

In the midst, Charles walked stately to the table, sat down, and thrust out his legs.

“Parson,” said he, “if you had but claimed my hair. The honours lie with you, sir; take ’em.”

He would have none but the Doctor handle him; and, when his ineffable smalls were burning, he rose up in his royal shift, and ruthlessly commandeering every other pair in the room, stood, the speechless captain of as shameful and defenceless a crew of buccaneers as ever lowered its flag to honesty.

Then the Doctor resumed his rug.

“Sir,” said he, trembling, “I now fulfil my bond. My granddaughter is sheltering, with other modest ladies, in the pike-house hard by.”

But the King swore—by divine right—a pretty oath or two, while the chill of his understandings helped to sober him.

“By my cold wit you have won! and there may she remain for me. And now, decent man,” he cried, “I do call my company to witness how you have made yourself to be more honoured in the breach than the observance; and since you go wanting a frock, a bishop’s you shall have.”

And with that he snatched the rug, and, skipping under it, sat on the table, grinning over the quenching of his amazed fire-eaters.

And this, if you will believe deponent, is the true, if unauthorized, version of Dr. Winthrop’s election, and of the confounding of Godsport on a writ of quo warranto.

THE STRENGTH OF THE ROPE

Si finis bonus est, totum bonum erit.

There were notices, of varying dates, posted in prominent places about the cliffs to warn the public not to go near them—unless, indeed, it were to read the notices themselves, which were printed in a very unobtrusive type. Of late, however, this Dogberrian caveat had been supplemented by a statement in the local gazette that the cliffs, owing to the recent rains succeeding prolonged frost, were in so ill a constitution that to approach them at all, even to decipher the warnings not to, was—well, to take your life out of the municipal into your own hands.

Now, had the Regius Professor a bee in his bonnet? Absurd. He knew the risks of foolhardiness as well as any pickpocket could have told him. Yet, neither general nor particular caution availed to abate his determination to examine, as soon as we had lunched, the interior formation of a cave or two, out of those black and innumerable, with which the undercliff was punctured like a warren.

I did not remonstrate, after having once discovered, folded down under his nose on the table, the printed admonition, and heard the little dry, professorial click of tongue on palate which was wont to dismiss, declining discussion of it, any idle or superfluous proposition. I knew my man—or automaton. He inclined to the Providence of the unimaginative; his only fetish was science. He was one of those who, if unfortunately buried alive, would turn what opportunity remained to them to a study of geological deposits. My “nerves,” when we were on a jaunt (fond word!) together, were always a subject of sardonic amusement with him.

Now, utterly unmoved by the prospect before him, he ate an enormous lunch (confiding it, incidentally, to an unerring digestion), rose, brushed some crumbs out of his beard, and said, “Well, shall we be off?”

In twenty minutes we had reached the caves. They lay in a very secluded little bay—just a crescent of sombre sand, littered along all its inner edge with débris from the towering cliffs which contained it.

“Are you coming with me?” said the Regius Professor.

Judged by his anxious eyes, the question might have been an invitation, almost a shamefaced entreaty. But the anxiety, never more than apparent, was delusive product of the preposterous magnifying-glasses which he wore. Did he ever remove those glasses, one was startled to discover, in the seemingly aghast orbs which they misinterpreted, quite mean little attic windows to an unemotional soul.

“Not by any means,” I said. “I will sit here, and think out your epitaph.”

He stared at me a moment with a puzzled expression, grinned slightly, turned, strode off towards the cliffs, and disappeared, without a moment’s hesitation, into the first accessible burrow. I was moved on the instant to observe that it was the most sinister-looking of them all. The tilted stratification, under which it yawned oblique, seemed on the very poise to close down upon it.

Now I set to pacing to and fro, essaying a sort of mechanical preoccupation in default of the philosophy I lacked. I was really in a state of clammy anxiety about the Professor. I poked in stony pools for little crabs, as if his life depended on my success. I made it a point of honour with myself not to leave off until I had found one. I tried, like a very amateur pickpocket, to abstract my mind from the atmosphere which contained it, only to find that I had brought mind and atmosphere away together. I bent down, with my back to the sea, and looking between my legs sought to regard life from a new point of view. Yet, even in that position, my eyes and ears were conscious, only in less degree, of the spectres which were always moving and rustling in the melancholy little bay.

Tekel upharsin. The hand never left off writing upon the rocks, nor the dust of its scoring to fall and whisper. That came away in flakes, or slid down in tiny avalanches—here, there, in so many places at once, that the whole face of the cliffs seemed to crawl like a maggoty cheese. The sound was like a vast conspiracy of voices—busy, ominous—aloft on the seats of an amphitheatre. They were talking of the Regius Professor, and his consideration in making them a Roman holiday.

Here, on no warrant but that of my senses, I knew the gazette’s warning to be something more than justified. It made no difference that my nerves were at the stretch. One could not hear a silence thus sown with grain of horror, and believe it barren of significance. Then, all in a moment, as it seemed to me, the resolution was taken, the voices hushed, and the whole bay poised on tiptoe of a suspense which preluded something terrific.

I stood staring at the black mouth which had engulfed the Regius Professor. I felt that a disaster was imminent; but to rush to warn him would be to embarrass the issues of his Providence—that only. For the instant a fierce resentment of his foolhardiness fired me—and was as immediately gone. I turned sick and half blind. I thought I saw the rock-face shrug and wrinkle; a blot of gall was expelled from it—and the blot was the Professor himself issued forth, and coming composedly towards me.

As he advanced, I turned my back on him. By the time he reached me I had made some small success of a struggle for self-mastery.

“Well,” he said. “I left myself none too much of a margin, did I?”

With an effort I faced about again. The base of the cliff was yet scarred with holes, many and irregular; but now some of those which had stared at me like dilated eyes were, I could have sworn it, over-lidded—the eyes of drowsing reptiles. And the Professor’s particular cave was gone.

I gave quite an absurd little giggle. This man was soulless—a monstrosity.

“Look here,” he said, conning my face with a certain concern, “it’s no good tormenting yourself with what might have happened. Here I am, you know. Supposing we go and sit down yonder, against that drift, till you’re better.”

He led the way, and, dropping upon the sand, lolled easily, talking to himself, by way of me, for some minutes. It was the kindest thing he could have done. His confident voice made scorn of the never-ceasing rustling and falling sounds to our rear. The gulls skated before my eyes, drawing wide arcs and figures of freedom in the air. Presently I topped the crisis, and drew a deep breath.

“Tell me,” I said—“have you ever in all your life known fear?”

The Regius Professor sat to consider.

“Well,” he answered presently, rubbing his chin, “I was certainly once near losing hold of my will, if that’s what you mean. Of course, if I had let go——”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” he said thoughtfully. “No—luckily.”

“You’re not taking credit for it?”

“Credit!” he exclaimed, surprised. “Why should I take credit for my freedom from a constitutional infirmity? In one way, indeed, I am only regretful that I am debarred that side of self-analysis.”

I could laugh lovelily, for the first time.

“Well,” I said, “will you tell me the story?”

“I never considered it in the light of a story,” answered the Regius Professor. “But, if it will amuse and distract you, I will make it one with pleasure. My memory of it, as an only experience in that direction, is quite vivid, I think I may say—” and he settled his spectacles, and began:

“It was during the period of my first appointment as Science Demonstrator to the Park Lane Polytechnic, a post which my little pamphlet on the Reef-building Serpulæ was instrumental in procuring me. I was a young man at the time, with a wide field of interests, but with few friends to help me in exploring it. My holidays I generally devoted to long, lonely tramps, knapsack on back, about the country.

“It was on one of these occasions that you must picture me entered into a solitary valley among the Shropshire hills. The season was winter; it was bitterly cold, and the prospect was of the dreariest. The interesting conformations of the land—the bone-structure, as I might say—were blunted under a thick pelt of snow, which made walking a labour. One never recognizes under such conditions the extent of one’s efforts, as inequalities of ground are without the contrast of surroundings to emphasize them, and one may be conscious of the strain of a gradient, and not know if it is of one foot in fifty or in five hundred.

“The scene was desolate to a degree; houseless, almost treeless—just white wastes and leaden sky, and the eternal fusing of the two in an indefinite horizon. I was wondering, without feeling actually dispirited, how long it was to last, when, turning the shoulder of a hill which had seemed to hump itself in my path, I came straight upon a tiny hamlet scattered over a widish area. There were some cottages, and a slated school building; and, showing above a lower hump a quarter of a mile beyond, the roofs and tall chimney of a factory.

“It was a stark little oasis, sure enough—the most grudging of moral respites from depression. Only from one place, it seemed, broke a green shoot. Not a moving figure was abroad; not a face looked from a window. Deathlily exclusive, the little stony buildings stood apart from one another, incurious, sullen, and self-contained.

“There was, however, the green shoot; and the stock from which it proceeded was the school building. That in itself was unlovely enough—a bleak little stone box in an arid enclosure. It looked hunched and grey with cold; and the sooty line of thaw at the foot of its wall only underscored its frostiness. But as if that one green shoot were the earnest of life lingering within, there suddenly broke through its walls the voices of young children singing; and, in the sound, the atmosphere of petrifaction lifted somewhat.

“Yes? What is it? Does anything amuse you? I am glad you are so far recovered, at least. Well——

“I like, I must confess, neither children nor music. At the same time, I am free to admit that those young voices, though they dismissed me promptly on my way, dismissed me pleased, and to a certain degree, as it were, reinvigorated. I passed through that little frigid camp of outer silence, and swung down the road towards the factory. As I advanced towards what I should have thought to be the one busy nucleus of an isolated colony, the aspect of desolation intensified, to my surprise, rather than diminished. But I soon saw the reason for this. The great forge in the hills was nothing but a wrecked and abandoned ruin, its fires long quenched, its ribs long laid bare. Seeing which, it only appeared to me a strange thing that any of the human part of its affairs should yet cling to its neighbourhood; and stranger still I thought it when I came to learn, as I did by and by, that its devastation was at that date an ancient story.

“What a squalid carcass it did look, to be sure; gaunt, and unclean, and ravaged by fire from crown to basement. The great flue of it stood up alone, a blackened monument to its black memory.

“Approaching and entering, I saw some writhed and tortured guts of machinery, relics of its old vital organs, fallen, withered, from its ribs. The floor, clammy to the tread, was littered with tumbled masonry; the sheet iron of the roof was shattered in a hundred places under the merciless bombardment of the weather; and, here and there, a scale of this was corroded so thin that it fluttered and buzzed in the draught like a ventilator. Bats of grimy cobweb hung from the beams; and the dead breath of all the dead place was acrid with cold soot.

“It was all ugly and sordid enough, in truth, and I had no reason to be exacting in my inspection of it. Turning, in a vaulting silence, I was about to make my way out, when my attention was drawn to the black opening of what looked like a shed or annex to the main factory. Something, some shaft or plant, revealing itself from the dim obscurity of this place, attracted my curiosity. I walked thither, and, with all due precaution because of the littered ground, entered. I was some moments in adapting my vision to the gloom, and then I discovered that I was in the mill well-house. It was a little dead-locked chamber, its details only partly decipherable in the reflected light which came in by the doorway. The well itself was sunk in the very middle of the floor, and the projecting wall of it rose scarce higher than my knees. The windlass, pivoted in a massive yoke, crossed the twilight at a height a little above my own; and I could easily understand, by the apparent diameter of its barrel, that the well was of a considerable depth.

“Now, as my eyes grew a little accustomed to the obscurity, I could see how a tooth of fire had cut even into this fastness. For the rope, which was fully reeled up upon the windlass, was scorched to one side, as though some exploded fragment of wood or brickwork had alighted there. It was an insignificant fact in itself, but my chance observation of it has its importance in the context; as has also the fact that the bight of the rope (from which the bucket had been removed) hung down a yard or so below the big drum.

“You have always considered me a sapient, or at least a rational creature, have you not? Well, listen to this. Bending over to plumb with my eyes the depth of the pit (an absurdity, to begin with, in that vortex of gloom), I caught with my left hand (wisdom number two) at the hanging end of rope in order to steady myself. On the instant the barrel made one swift revolution, and stuck. The movement, however, had thrown me forward and down, so that my head and shoulders, hanging over, and actually into, the well, pulled me, without possibility of recovery, from my centre of gravity. With a convulsive wrench of my body, I succeeded in bringing my right hand to the support of my left. I was then secure of the rope; but the violence of the act dragged my feet and knees from their last desperate hold, and my legs came whipping helpless over the well-rim. The weight of them in falling near jerked me from my clutch—a bad shock, to begin with. But a worse was in store for me. For I perceived, in the next instant, that the rusty, long-disused windlass was beginning slowly to revolve, and was letting me down into the abyss.

“I broke out in a sweat, I confess—a mere diaphoresis of nature; a sort of lubricant to the jammed mechanism of the nerves. I don’t think we are justified in attributing my first sensations to fear. I was exalted, rather—promoted to the analysis of a very exquisite, scarce mortal, problem. My will, as I hung by a hair over the abysm, was called upon to vindicate itself under an utmost stress of apprehension. I felt, ridiculous as it may appear, as if the surrounding dark were peopled with an invisible auditory, waiting, curious, to test the value of my philosophy.

“Here, then, were the practical problems I had to combat. The windlass, as I have said, revolved slowly, but it revolved persistently. If I would remain with my head above the well-rim—which, I freely admit, I had an unphilosophic desire to do—I must swarm as persistently up the rope. That was an eerie and airy sort of treadmill. To climb, and climb, and always climb, paying out the cord beneath me, that I might remain in one place! It was to repudiate gravitation, which I spurned from beneath my feet into the depths. But when, momentarily exhausted, I ventured to pause, some nightmare revolt against the sense of sinking which seized me, would always send me struggling and wriggling, like a drowning body, up to the surface again. Fortunately, I was slightly built and active; yet I knew that wind and muscle were bound sometime to give out in this swarming competition against death. I measured their chances against the length of the rope. There was a desperate coil yet unwound. Moreover, in proportion as I grew the feebler, grew the need for my greater activity. For there were already signs that the great groaning windlass was casting its rust of ages, and was beginning to turn quicker in its sockets. If it had only stuck, paused one minute in its eternal round, I might have set myself oscillating, gradually and cautiously, until I was able to seize with one hand, then another, upon the brick rim, which was otherwise beyond my reach. But now, did I cease climbing for an instant and attempt a frantic clutch at it, down I sank like a clock weight, my fingers trailed a yard in cold slime, and there I was at my mad swarming once more—the madder that I must now make up for lost ground.