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accomplished, and possibly I might not wander from the path. I would take my chances.

"I guess I won't try it, then," said I. "I'll walk down the river and will return by supper-time."

It was then eleven o'clock. I left the porch. I was now on the track for Nosoul. It was my set purpose to take his life. I was fully armed. The thirst for revenge was too strong for delay, or I would have waited on the opening of the trail until his return in the evening.

I walked with alacrity, and had proceeded for some distance along the familiar path of the previous night's rambles without as yet having caught a glimpse of the brook near where I was to turn.

Frequently I stopped for an interval of rest. For one of these breathing spells, having followed the path up the wild, precipitous front of the mountain till the Nautihala gleamed below me at the distance of a hundred yards, I had seated myself on a projecting rock, when I saw on the trail, a short space from me, through the green, scrubby foliage of cedars and firs, what looked like the form of a

man.

From my point of observation, only a portion of his back was visible. I at once sprang up and started toward it. A minute after I was standing over the form of Dick Nosoul as he lay stretched out on the rugged path. There was something the matter with the man. He was writhing as though in horrible agony. His face as he turned it upward to me was frightfully distorted. With an effort he spoke.

"Oh, man! Too late-too late! I'm a goner!" His eyes rolled back until only the white balls were visible, while the muscles of his face twitched spasmodically.

I forgot my mission. The man to me was, for the time being, a fellow-creature in distress and in need of my assistance.

I noticed that his clothes were partly torn from him, and the upper portion of his leg and side of his body were swollen to a deep, dark color. That he had undoubtedly been bitten by a rattlesnake was my first thought.

"What is it? How did this happen?" I asked. "I'm snake-bit," breathing heavily, he answered. "On the side of the mounting, about a mile from hyar, I knelt down to a spring for a drink. A bell-tail under me, coiled up in the grass, was hit by my knee. He sprung his rattles and struck at the same time, fastening on my hip. I managed to git this far."

There was no help for him. He would be a corpse in a few minutes. I decided to obtain a confession, if possible, from him.

"I'm afraid your case is hopeless," I commenced. "If there is anything you might wish to relieve your mind of before you die, you can make me your confessor."

"No, nothing. Shoot me, man, for God's sake!" he groaned.

"How know you this? I confess nothing, and—” His breath seemed for a moment cut short; his face blanched to a more horrid whiteness, and he hissed, as he pointed past me down the path :

"Great God! Again-again! Thar he is now! He's comin'-his ghost-with the bullet-hole in his forehead !" The shrubbery fringing the edge of the path before us was broken apart. A sheer precipice of splintered rocks, nothing more, shot downward, far down, to the impetuous river.

As the man hissed these last freezing sentences, and as I turned for a vain look in the direction he pointed, he had raised himself upright on his tottering feet. I imagined his motive, and attempted to clutch him; but too late.

With a blood-curdling cry, he flung himself from the cliff. His body bounded from successive crags, and sank from view in the white waters of the stream. It rose not to my sight, though, clinging to a leaning cedar, I watched the waters long for it.

The tragedy was complete, and nothing remains to be told.

WRITING WITH LEMON JUICE.

FATHER JOHN GERARD, of the Society of Jesus, who was confined and cruelly tortured in the Tower of London, at the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, was in the habit of writing letters in orange or lemon juice to his friends. The manner in which he thus baffled the vigilance of his jailers is described in detail in his highly interesting autobiography, published a few years ago by the Rev. John Morris. Father Gerard says: "Now lemon-juice has this property, that what is written in it can be read in water quite as well as by fire, and as the paper is dried the writing disappears again till it is steeped afresh, or again held to the fire. But anything written with orange-juice is at once washed out by water, and cannot be read at all in that way; and if held to the fire, though the characters are thus made to appear, they will not disappear; so that a letter of this sort once read can never be delivered to any one as if it had not been read. The party will see at once that it has been read, and will certainly refuse and disown it if it should contain anything dangerous."

One result of Father Gerard's orange-juice correspondence was, that with the aid of zealous friends outside, he effected his escape from the tower in 1597. The last ten years of his life were spent in the English college at Rome, where he closed a long, arduous and meritorious career on July 27th, 1630, aged seventy-three.

FREDERICK THE GREAT'S BAND-WAGON.

DURING the brief occupation of Berlin by the Russian army, in 1760, the invaders plundered the Royal Arsenal

I bent closer over him, and, speaking in a low, firm of its more valuable arms and trophies of war, and carried voice, said:

"Dick Nosoul, fifteen years ago, one midnight, at a place a little further up this path, and on the bank of this same river, in cold blood and but for money, you murdered a gray-headed old man, a stranger to you, but my father. Do you acknowledge it?"

Before I had finished, a look of surprise began to spread itself over his convulsed features; then a look of terror followed, usurping the places of torture and surprise.

With a strength bred of the latter, he raised himself partly on his knees, his pallid face quivering as he spoke:

off their booty to Russia. Among the objects peculiarly precious to the Prussian army that were thus "annexed" was a splendid car, presented by Frederick William I., thirty years previously, to his corps of field artillery, for the accommodation of their drums and colors on extraordinary occasions, such as reviews or grand parades.

In shape resembling a shell, and painted a bright scarlet, this car, drawn by four gray stallions, with tiger-skin trappings and tail red-and-white plumes, used to precede the artillery column during its march past the salutingflag, surrounded by the so-called "Janissary-Music," in which his Majesty took such especial delight. The head drummer of the artillery-corps occupied the back seat,

having in front of him two huge silver-mounted drums, suspended in slings, and behind him the four standards of the corps.

Frederick the Great refused to take this costly equipage with him when he started from Berlin at the commencement of the Seven Years' War, never dreaming that the Russians would succeed in pouncing upon this capital behind his back; and so it fell into the hands of a Muscovite general, who conveyed it to St. Petersburg, where it

was deposited with great pomp and ceremony in the armory at Fort Petropaulovsky.

Czar Alexander III. has lately intimated his intention to restore this interesting relic of Prussia's early military history to its rightful owner, the German Emperor. It will be brought to Berlin by a Russian guard of honor, and deposited in the Arsenal on the Linden Avenue, from which it was forcibly removed nearly a century and a quarter ago.

WITH wide white wings and towers fair,
White battlements and balcony,
And rainbowed windows flashing tall,
Beside the dark-blue, dreaming sea
My castle stood; the golden doors,

FATIMA.

BY G. A. DAVIS.

Sealed to the world, swung wide for me-
Love was the key.

The marble courts were dim with shade
Of blossomed lime and orange boughs;
The diamond dust of fountain, spray
Shook in the perfumed air all day,

And all the long, blue starry nights
The nightingales sang to the sea

That clasped about my lordly house -
My house, where Love and I walked free
And kept the key.

And he-my love, the castle's lord-
What shall I say of him? I ween

No goodlier knight in olden time

By bower or tourney games was seen;
Not Lancelot brave, nor Tristram true,

Nor Galahad pure, I dreamed, could be
More strong, more tender, or more clean
In God's clear sight, than he!

The long, long days were always June,
A paradise of scent and bloom,
That breathed through all the warm sea-air
And filled each sunshine-flooded room.

The blossoms drifted white as snow,

All day the deep grass held the dew
Where thick-leaved lindens meshed their boughs,

Nor let the sliding sunbeams through.

Oh, days of June! so fair to me

Until he dropped the kзy!

A little clew-I scarcely know

What shape the cruel warder bore.

Whose touch upon the rusted lock
Flung wide for me that awful door!
Out of the sunshine evermore,
Out of the warmth of June, alas!
Into that room-where only he,
Till now, had held the key!

A close-barred-room-a darkened place-
I had not known that anywhere
In all my castle such a spot

Lay hidden from the light and air!

I had not guessed that, stark and still
Behind the iron-welded bars,

That dead thing lay, with upturned face,
Shut from the sunshine and the stars!

But I have crossed the threshold grim,
And I have seen her lying there,
Her white limbs stiffened into stone,
Blood clotted on her trailing hair,
And in her eye's wide horror set

The frozen mystery of despair!

The long white wings, the turrets tall,

The shining stretch of sea-washed wall,
Looks from the headland clear and free;
The sunshine fires the casement's glass,
The fountain flings up merrily

Its rainbowed waves of shaken spray-
And no one knows, save I and he,

That locked room's sunless mystery;
None know that, hidden in his heart,

He keeps-and I have found-the key!

But sometimes in the long blue nights,
Waking to hear the moaning sea,
I think, What if the dead should be
Not dead, but only sleeping there,
And dreaming of life's old delights?
What if she turn and rise-set free,
O God I since Love still keeps that key?

SHOES AND THEIR HISTORY.

BY M. E. W. SHERWOOD.

THE shoe, the hat, the glove and the purse, the ring | or string. He has but to put out his foot to be recogand the belt, the fan and the sword, are said to be the eight marked features of human apparel which must effectively tell their own story of epoch and of rank. Of all these, the shoe has the most varied history, and is, more especially, in all times and seasons, than any of its seven sisters, the illuminated missal of fashion.

We know well the foot of an Egyptian priest, for only he wore sandals of palm-leaf and papyrus (except that the Hebrews, their slaves, sometimes roughly imitated them. The Hebrews, however, wrapped up their poor feet in linen, or made shoes of wood and iron and brass for their soldiers). We know the foot of the senator of ancient Rome, with his high buskins ornamented with an ivory crescent, and called "Calcealunati," and tied with lachet

nized to-day in any picture. He did indulge, too, the Roman patrician, in "Calceamenta and Cothurni," which were simply boots covering the whole leg, made of the skins of wild animals, laced up in front, with the paws and heads of the slaughtered beasts hanging over as flaps at the knees. The skin was dyed purple or red, and great care was taken to insure a perfect fit. But these shoes are left open at the toes, as we see, by the ancient statues, which would not please our dandies of to-day.

Specimens of Egyptian sandals, formed of strips of palm-leaf, nicely fitted together and furnished with bands of the stem of the papyrus, are found in Egyptian tombs, and are preserved in various museums. Indeed, tho earliest records that we have of shoes are to be found in

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the sculptures and bas-reliefs of the ancient Egyptians. Plutarch tells us that the women of Egypt were not allowed to wear shoes, and there is record of the Caliph Hakkan, founder of the religious sect of the Druses, having decreed that, on the pain of death, no shoemaker should manufacture shoes, sandals, or any covering for the foot for the use of women.

How the daughters of Egypt evaded this stern decree is not known. They may have learned how to make their own shoes, or it may be that the cobblers of those days were soft-hearted, and preferred offending the Caliph to incurring the displeasures of the fair sex.

Women, however, have never cared much for sumptuary bans, evading them as they do the paying of duties on French dresses to-day, in all ages of the world.

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ment arising from contact with anything that had died led to the entire disuse of skin or leather by the priests of Egypt.

Their shoes were frequently ornamented with representations of the Gods Isis, Osiris and Horus, and are intensely individual and characteristic.

We learn that the revenues of the Lake Hieris, which abounded with fish, were given to Queen Nitocris for her "shoe-ties." Whether this insignificant article of dress could have been fashioned of so rare materials to make the expenditure of such a sum possible, or whether this term with the Egyptians bore the same significance that "pin-money" has with maids and matrons of to-day, the chronicle saith not.

In the time of the ancient Greeks the wearing of shoes

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of Athens. On entering the house the shoes were removed, as is the custom with the Orientals of to-day. Homer speaks of a man who, on leaving his friead's house, "tied his splendid soles to his feet." Spartan youths were trained to go barefooted.

With the Romans the matter of dressing the feet was a very important one, and by a man's shoes not only his individual taste was marked, but also his rank.

As a sign of inferiority, slaves were obliged to go with naked feet; a free man would scarcely dare to stir abroad unshod, lest his rank should be underrated, but there are some men superior to fashion in all ages.

The same rule prevailed in the French West Indies, and the colored girls still in slavery, especially if very nearly white, wore very long skirts, to hide her feet, while their more favored sisters who had been freed were equally careful to wear dresses short enough to show their shoes, the token of their freedom.

The calceus, or boot, and solea, or sandal, were the two kinds of shoes most in vogue with the Greeks and Romans. The calceus corresponded to our boot. It was made of undressed leather, covered the whole foot, and was fastened above the ankle by a leathern strap, which was bound firmly about the leg. Black was the ordinary color of the calceus, but it was not uncommon to find them of scarlet or dark-red leather. The Roman senators sometimes wore shoes of black or white leather, ornamented by an arabesque of gold or silver, or by the letter "C," signifying the Centum, or hundred, which was the number of the Senators in the first days of the republic.

The sandal or solea consisted of a cork or leathern sole cut in the shape of the foot and bound about the instep with slender leathern thongs or bands of cloth. In some cases the sandal was merely bound to the foot with straps passing simply over the foot, but the most graceful of these had a thong which passed between the first and second toe, and joining the strap which crossed the instep, was seamed with it at the ankle.

The luxury which became more and more extravagant in the days of the decline of the empire affected the shoes as naturally as any other part of the costume.

Precious stones studded the sandals, and not contented with ornaments of chiseled silver and massive gold, certain dandies wore soles of solid gold; the leathers were colored with the most costly dyes, and embroidered with the most exquisite designs, so that the shoe, from being a useful commonplace article of dress in that time, arose almost to the rank of a jewel.

As a love-token a lady's sandal was regarded by the Roman lovers very much as

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the remains of Augustus were collected from the funeral pile by noblemen of the first rank with bare feet.

Among his other extravagances, the Emperor Heliogabalus never wore the same calceus twice. We learn from Horace that the soceresses went with naked feet while intent upon their magical art; and from another authority we have on an ancient gem the intaglio of a procession made to conciliate the gods, in the time of a drought, in which the participants walked with unclad feet.

In the times of the early Christians an entire revolution regarding the fashion of shoes had taken place, and all preachers exhorted their followers to simplicity in this article of dress. The extravagant ostentation of the Roman dames was rigidly forbidden, and we again find the "conveniency of the foot" taking the place of an article of use only, and no longer one of ornament.

Tertullian, preaching humility to women, insisted on the simplicity of the foot-gear, saying that in case the glory of martyrhood awaited them, "their beribboned feet would not be convenient for the wearing of shackles."

Of all the thousand fashions invented for the protection of the feet in the different ages, the sandal has the advantage of being at once the most beautiful, the most healthful, if not the most comfortable.

It has been revived by the artists of all ages, and in sculpture is the only covering of the foot which it is possible to represent with grace. Indeed, it is the sign of the classic age.

Until the tenth century the Roman calceus, with various modifications, was worn by the French and English. But at that time more attention began to be paid to the covering of the feet, and we observe patterns and embroideries of intricate and pleasing figures ornamenting the neatly made shoes.

In the thirteenth century silk began to be used, but

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only on rare occasions, in the manufacture of shoes. As they became more elaborate, they grew more inconvenient and unwieldy, and then the pointed shoe, that greatest absurdity of fashion, began to be introduced. In the reign of William Rufus, the Chevalier Robert-le-Cornu, a famous beau, invented this monstrous fashion, which for four centuries held its sway over the public foot. Though strongly inveighed against, "the points," in the reign of Richard II., had increased to such a prodigious length that they were fastened up to the knees by chains of silver and gold. The upper parts were cut to imitate the win dows of a church, and the whole was made extravagantly conspicuous. In three centuries the Church issued bulls against this fashion. The extravagance of taste next impelled the width of toe, which Queen Mary restricted, by proclamation, to six inches.

The shoe, according to the pictures of that time, fitted the foot from the heel to the toe with glovelike precision, then a point, like a twisted horn, or resembling the beak of a bird, shot out into space for a distance, which varied from two to two and a half feet (the length etiquette demanded for the points of a princess's shoes). One foot was the length ordered for the boots of the bourgeoisie, or middle-class people. These points sometimes lay flat upon the ground, but were more frequently curved upward, in the shape of a crescent. In an effigy of Jean de Chalons, a nobleman of the fourteenth century, the point of the shoes is curved into the shape of a shepherd's crook. In armor, even, this senseless and inconvenient fashion was introduced, and in the military museums of France and England specimens are presented of steel and iron shoes with points. In battle these points were excessively inconvenient, and at the battle of Sempach we learn that "The Lords having dismounted from their horses, were obliged to cut off the points of their shoes, so incommoded were their movements by them."

The clergy, as we have seen, inveighed against this fashion, which they denounced as "unseemly," and Charles V. published an edict sternly forbidding all persons wearing pointed shoes, which he says "are against good manners, and are in derision of God and the church."

Early in the sixteenth century the pointed shoes had disappeared; kings and popes, prelates and bishops had issued edicts condemning them, but only the force of a new fashion was able to accomplish the task of banishing the pointed shoe. A large, square shoe, very broad at the toes, succeeded, and as it was the very antithesis of the shoe it displaced; for this reason, probably, it was warmly received.

In the sixteenth century the high English boots, with tops, became fashionable, the top being frequently trimmed with rich lace when worn by persons of quality. It was no longer allowable, as it had been in the days of the pointed shoes, to dress one foot in yellow and the other in red; it was considered essential that shoes should match. They were generally made of the beautiful buff-colored leather imported from Spain.

In the seventeenth century the high boots became very extravagant in form and shape, but they were still graceful, though the wide tops would have been large enough for a Jerseyman to carry home his Sunday leg o' mutton. Low shoes were always worn for evening dress at this period, and were ornamented by fantastic bows and rosettes, the "windmill bow" being a very favorite pattern. In the eighteenth century the buckle was introduced, and low shoes again became popular, supplemented by very high heels, set far under the soles of the foot.

During the time of Louis XVI. great extravagance in the quality of boots and shoes reigned in France, and

rich embroideries were introduced, costly brocades were employed in the making; but in the Revolution, that great leveling of all that was superfluous and luxurious, simple shoes returned to France and England, and so on over the whole continent.

In speaking of the foot-gear of the nineteenth century we must give preference to the English boot, as being the most comfortable and sensible in use among the civilized nations of the earth. It is the fashion for French and American women to speak contemptuously of the big feet of their English sisters, and to draw unfavorable comparison between them and their own small and beautifully shaped pedestals, incased as they are in that slipper of the time of Louis XV., which has come down to us, and still binds the female foot with its agonizing constraint. The difference of size between the English and American foot is not so great, after all, but lies in the difference of the boot, although the American foot is the smallest.

On going to Yapp, one of the leading bootmakers of London, and expressing a desire for a strong, easy walking-boot, the American woman is not a little startled at being told to stand on a sheet of paper, on which an outline of her foot is traced. The necessary measures are then made, and in the course of a fortnight the boots come home, made of a strong, soft leather, with a wide sole and flat, broad heel, not more than an inch high. The boot, in shape, somewhat resembles the human foot, being straight in the inner and curved on the outer side. A cold chill strikes to the heart of a would-be reformer, and with a sigh she tries the boot on. At first she will declare that they are "miles too large for her," and that she "never can be comfortable in such boats," and ten to one, on studying her feet in the glass, she will toss the boots aside, to be relegated again to the depths of her trunk, or to be given to her less vain Abigail. But if she be of a practical turn of mind, and really in earnest about her desire to be rid of all the inconveniences attending the wearing of ill-made boots, our American will, on some foggy morning, when she is bound on an errand to an unfashionable part of London, "just try the boots." And when, after a long day of shopping or sight-seeing-the two most fatiguing of pursuits-she finds that her first care need not be to rid her "poor feet" of their casings; that those extremities are no more or less tired than the rest of her body; that she is free from those shooting, agonizing pains which for so many years have tortured her, the dainty "bottine" of Pinard will be for ever discarded, and the absurdity of a Louis Quinze high heel never again give her the tottering gait, which is only a shade better than that of the Chinese women.

Were a prize to be offered for the most beautiful naked foot among the competitors, there would be found many an English, and scarcely a French girl, whose foot could be bared, and found to differ little from the classic standard. The idea that a small foot is a beauty, no matter how large a body it may have to support, is one of those delusions which it is as hard to displace from the mind of woman as that an hour-glass is the most graceful shape which the female figure can be tormented into resembling. According to the classic measure and standpoint, the foot should measure one-sixth of the height of the whole person.

If acute suffering and general hideous misshapenness were the only consequences of the French boot and high heel, this protest against it might seem of little importance, but disorders of the most painful and dangerous character are among its fruits. The Paris hospitals are full of women whose maladies can be traced to the unnatural angle at which their bodies have been thrown by

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