use of for a time than finally bidding farewell to. That was while he was still with no very grave mis175 givings as to the issue of his sickness, and felt the sources of life still springing essentially unadulterate within him. From time to time, indeed, Marius, labouring eagerly at 180 the poem from his dictation, was haunted by a feeling of the triviality of such work just then. The recurrent sense of some obscure danger beyond the mere danger of death, 185 vaguer than that and by so much the more terrible, like the menace of some shadowy adversary in the dark with whose mode of attack they had no acquaintance, disturbed him 190 now and again through those hours of excited attention to his manuscript, and to the purely physical wants of Flavian. Still, during these three days there was much hope and cheer195 fulness, and even jesting. Half-consciously Marius tried to prolong one or another relieving circumstance of the day, the preparations for rest and morning refreshment, for instance; 200 sadly making the most of the little luxury of this or that, with something of the feigned cheer of the mother who sets her last morsels before her famished child as for a feast, but 205 really that he 'may eat it and die.'

On the afternoon of the seventh day he allowed Marius finally to put aside the unfinished manuscript. For the enemy, leaving the chest 210 quiet at length though much exhausted, had made itself felt with full power again in a painful vomiting, which seemed to shake his body asunder, with great consequent pro215 stration. From that time the distress increased rapidly downwards. Omnia tum vero vitai claustra lababant; and soon the cold was mounting with sure pace from the dead feet 220 to the head.

to

And now Marius began more than to suspect what the issue must be, and henceforward could but watch with a sort of agonised fascination the rapid but systematic work of the 225 destroyer, faintly relieving a little the mere accidents of the sharper forms of suffering. Flavian himself appeared, in full consciousness at last in clear-sighted, deliberate 230 estimate of the actual crisis be doing battle with his adversary. His mind surveyed, with great distinctness, the various suggested modes of relief. He must without fail get 235 better, he would fancy, might he be removed to a certain place on the hills where as a child he had once recovered from sickness, but found that he could scarcely raise his head 240 from the pillow without giddiness. As if now surely foreseeing the end, he would set himself, with an eager effort, and with that eager and angry look, which is noted as one of the 245 premonitions of death in this disease, to fashion out, without formal dictation, still a few more broken verses of his unfinished work, in hard-set determination, defiant of pain, to 250 arrest this or that little drop at least from the river of sensuous imagery rushing so quickly past him.

But at length delirium - symptom that the work of the plague was 255 done, and the last resort of life yielding to the enemy - broke the coherent order of words and thoughts; and Marius, intent on the coming agony, found his best hope in the 260 increasing dimness of the patient's mind. In intervals of clearer consciousness the visible signs of cold, of sorrow and desolation, were very painful. No longer battling with the 265 disease, he seemed as it were to place himself at the disposal of the victorious foe, dying passively, like some dumb creature, in hopeless ac

270 quiescence at last. That old, halfpleading petulance, unamiable, yet, as it might seem, only needing conditions of life a little happier than they had actually been, to become 275 refinement of affection, a delicate

grace in its demand on the sympathy of others, had changed in those moments of full intelligence to a clinging and tremulous gentleness, 280 as he lay 'on the very threshold of death' with a sharply contracted hand in the hand of Marius, to his almost surprised joy, winning him now to an absolutely self-forget285 ful devotion. There was a new sort of pleading in the misty eyes, just because they took such unsteady note of him, which made Marius feel as if guilty; anticipating thus a form 290 of self-reproach with which even the tenderest ministrant may be sometimes surprised, when, at death, affectionate labour suddenly ceasing leaves room for the suspicion of some 295 failure of love perhaps, at one or another minute point in it. Marius almost longed to take his share in the suffering, that he might understand so the better how to relieve it. 300 It seemed that the light of the lamp distressed the patient, and Marius extinguished it. The thunder which had sounded all day among the hills, with a heat not unwelcome 305 to Flavian, had given way at nightfall to steady rain; and in the darkness Marius lay down beside him, faintly shivering now in the sudden cold, to lend him his own warmth, 310 undeterred by the fear of contagion which had kept other people from passing near the house. At length about daybreak he perceived that the last effort had come with a 315 revival of mental clearness, as Marius understood by the contact, light as it was, in recognition of him there. Is it a comfort,' he whispered then,

'that I shall often come and weep over you?' 'Not unless I be 320 aware, and hear you weeping!'

The sun shone out on the people going to work for a long hot day, and Marius was standing by the dead, watching, with deliberate pur- 325 pose to fix in his memory every detail, that he might have this picture in reserve, should any hour of forgetfulness hereafter come to him with the temptation to feel completely happy again. A feeling of outrage, of resentment against nature itself, mingled with an agony of pity, as he noted on the now placid features a certain look of humility, almost 3 abject, like the expression of a smitten child or animal, as of one, fallen at last, after bewildering struggle, wholly under the power of a merciless adversary. From mere tenderness of 340 soul he would not forget one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his memory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to die, against a 345 time that may come.

The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to watch by it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing strength, just in 350 time. The first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense from time to time on the little altar placed 355 beside the bier. It was the recurrence of the thing - that unchanged outline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest rustle seemed to speak that finally over- 360 came his determination. Surely, here, in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, which had come over him before though in minor degree when the mind of Fla- 365 vian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the pains of death.

of the knife is a natural gift and points to growth. Pauper Patternes 25 were numerous when the fifth head of the race was the hope of his county. A Patterne was in the Marines.

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The country and the chief of this 30 family were simultaneously informed of the existence of one Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne, of the corps of the famous hard fighters, through an act of heroism of the unpretending 35 cool sort which kindles British blood, on the part of the modest young officer, in the storming of some eastern riverain stronghold, somewhere about the coast of China. The 40 officer's youth was assumed on the strength of his rank, perhaps likewise from the tale of his modesty: 'he had only done his duty.' Our Willoughby was then at College, emulous of the generous enthusiasm of his years, and strangely impressed by the report, and the printing of his name in the newspapers. He thought over it for several months, 50 when, coming to his title and heritage, he sent Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne a cheque for a sum of money amounting to the gallant fellow's pay per annum, at the same 55 time showing his acquaintance with the first, or chemical, principles of generosity, in the remark to friends at home, that 'blood is thicker than water. The man is a Marine, but he is a Patterne. How any Patterne should have drifted into the Marines, is of the order of questions which are senselessly asked of the great dispensary. In the complimentary 65 letter accompanying his cheque, the lieutenant was invited to present himself at the ancestral Hall, when convenient to him, and he was assured that he had given his relative and friend a taste for a soldier's life. Young Sir Willoughby was

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fond of talking of his 'military namesake and distant cousin, young Patterne the Marine.' It was funny; and not less laughable was the description of his namesake's deed of valour: with the rescued British sailor inebriate, and the hauling off to captivity of the three braves of the black dragon on a yellow ground, 80 and the tying of them together back to back by their pigtails, and driving of them into our lines upon a newly devised dying-top style of march that inclined to the oblique, like the 85 astonished six eyes of the celestial prisoners, for straight they could not go. The humour of gentlemen at home is always highly excited by such cool feats. We are We are a small 90 island, but you see what we do. The ladies at the Hall, Sir Willoughby's mother, and his aunts Eleanor and Isabel, were more affected than he by the circumstance 95 of their having a Patterne in the Marines. But how then! We English have ducal blood in business: we have, genealogists tell us, royal blood in common trades. For all 100 our pride we are a queer people; and you may be ordering butcher's meat of a Tudor, sitting on the cane-bottom chairs of a Plantagenet. By and by you may but cherish 105 your reverence. Young Willoughby made a kind of shock-head or football hero of his gallant distant cousin, and wondered occasionally that the fellow had been content to despatch 110 a letter of effusive thanks without availing himself of the invitation to partake of the hospitalities of Pat

terne.

He was one afternoon parading 115 between showers on the stately garden terrace of the Hall, in company with his affianced, the beautiful and dashing Constantia Durham, followed by knots of ladies and gentlemen vowed 120

to fresh air before dinner, while it was to be had. Chancing with his usual happy fortune (we call these things dealt to us out of the great 126 hidden dispensary, chance) to glance up the avenue of limes, as he was in the act of turning on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be added, discoursing with passion's 180 privilege of the passion of love to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon espying a thickset stumpy man crossing the gravel 185 space from the avenue to the front steps of the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman 'on his hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his,' Willoughby 140 subsequently observed to the ladies of his family in the Scriptural style of gentlemen who do bear the stamp. His brief sketch of the creature was repulsive. The visitor carried a bag, 145 and his coat-collar was up, his hat was melancholy; he had the appearance of a bankrupt tradesman absconding; no gloves, no umbrella.

As to the incident we have to 150 note, it was very slight. The card of Lieutenant Patterne was handed to Sir Willoughby, who laid it on the salver, saying to the footman, 'Not at home.'

to his friends a heavy unpresentable senior as the celebrated gallant Lieutenant of Marines, and the same as a member of his family! He had talked of the man too much, 165 too enthusiastically, to be able to do so. A young subaltern, even if passably vulgar in figure, can be shuffled through by the aid of the heroical story humourously exaggerated in 170 apology for his aspect. Nothing can be done with a mature and stumpy Marine of that rank. Considerate

ness dismisses him on the spot, without parley. It was performed by a 176 gentleman supremely advanced at a very early age in the art of cutting.

Young Sir Willoughby spoke a word of the rejected visitor to Miss Durham, in response to her startled 180 look: 'I shall drop him a cheque,' he said, for she seemed personally wounded, and had a face of crim

son.

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The young lady did not reply. Dating from the humble departure of Lieutenant Crossjay Patterne up the limes-avenue under a gathering rain-cloud, the ring of imps in attendance on Sir Willoughby main- 190 tained their station with strict observation of his movements at all hours; and were comparisons in quest, the sympathetic eagerness of the eyes of caged monkeys for the hand 196 about to feed them, would supply one. They perceived in him a fresh development and very subtle manifestation of the very old thing from which he had sprung.

RO

1894), born in Edinburgh, was descended from a wealthy family of Scotch civil engineers and lighthouse-builders. He first studied engineering and afterwards law at the University of Edinburgh, and, Herrig-Forster, British Authors.

in 1875, was called to the bar. Meanwhile, however, he had been writing essays for the magazines, and finally decided to make literature his profession. To strengthen his delicate constitution, he went in for much walking and pedestrian travelling

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