persuasions more steadily. I ought never to
have come down here again. The excitement
of its miserable recollections is too much for
me. The man at the inn called me by my name
this morning, and said he recollected me—
looking up towards the church as he spoke. Damn
him! All day I seem to have been acting
against my will. What should possess me to
go there, this afternoon? Round about among
the graves, until I came to the grassy hillock on
the north side of the church, where they buried
Honor that night, without a prayer. I sat down
on the low wall, and looked across to the hills
beyond the river, listening to the monotonous
sing-song of the fall. I would give all I possess
to-day, to be able to tread back or to untread a
score of the years of my life. It seems such a
blank; of all I planned and schemed, how little
have I accomplished! Watching by Honor's
grave, I fell to thinking of her. What had either
of us done that we should be so wretched? Is it
part and parcel of the great injustice of life, that
some must suffer so signally while others
escape? The coarse grass is never cut at the
north side of the church, nettles and brambles
grow about the grave. Honor was mad, poor
soul; they might have given her a prayer for
rest, if they were forbidden to believe she died
in hope. I prayed for her to-day—more need,
perhaps, to pray for myself—and then there
came a crazed whirl in my brain, and I set off
to find Linchley. As I came down near the
water, the fall sounded very tumultuous; it was
sultry hot, and I should have liked to turn
down by the river, but I said, "No, it is the
tenth of August! If I am to meet Honor
Livingston to-day, I'll not meet her by
Ashenfall!" So I came home to our lodgings, to find
that Linchley had gone over to Warfe, and had
left a message that he should not return until
tomorrow. I have the night before me alone; it
is not like an English night at all; it is like the
nights I remember at Cadiz, which always
heralded a tremendous storm. And I think we
shall have a storm here, too, before the morning.

                                 ————

Those were the last words James Lawrence ever
wrote, Gentlemen. Further than this, no man can
speak of his death; it is plain to me that one of
his mad fits was coming on before he left Lisbon;
that it grew and increased until he came
here; and that here it reached its climax and
urged him to his death. I believe in the
ghosts James Lawrence saw, as I believe in the
haunting power of any great misdeed that has
driven a fellow-creature into deadly sin.

When David Polreath had finished, the chairman
gave the teetotum such a swift and sudden
twirl, to be beforehand with any interruption,
that it twirled among all the glasses and into all
corners of the table, and finally, flew off the
table and lodged in Captain Jorgan's waistcoat.

"A kind of a judgment!" said the captain,
taking it out. " What's to be done now? I
know no story, except Down Easters, and they
didn't happen to myself, or any one of my
acquaintance, and you couldn't enjoy 'em without
going out of your minds first. And perhaps the
company ain't prepared to do that?"

The chairman interposed by rising and
declaring it to be his perroud perrivilege to stop
preliminary observations.

"Wa'al," said the captain, "I defer to the
President which an't at all what they do in
my country, where they lay into him, head,
limbs, and body." Here he slapped his leg.
"But I beg to ask a preliminary question.
Colonel Polreath has read from a diary. Might
I read from a pipe-light?"

The chairman requested explanation.

"The history of the pipe-light," said the captain,
"is just this:—that it's verses, and was
made on the voyage home by a passenger I
brought over. And he was a quiet crittur of
a middle-aged man with a pleasant countenance.
And he wrote it on the head of a cask. And
he was a most etarnal time about it tew. And
he blotted it as if he had wrote it in a continual
squall of ink. And then he took an indigestion,
and I physicked him for want of a better doctor.
And then to show his liking for me he copied
it out fair, and gave it to me for a pipe-light.
And it ain't been lighted yet, and that's a fact."

"Let it be read," said the chairman.

"With thanks to Colonel Polreath for setting
the example," pursued the captain, "and with
apologies to the Honourable A. Parvis and the
whole of the present company for this passenger's
having expressed his mind in verses—
which he may have done along of bein' sea-sick,
and he was very—the pipe-light, unrolled, comes
to this:

WE sit by the fire so wide and red,
    With the dance of the young within,
Who have yet small learning of cold and dread,
    And of sorrow no more than of sin;
Nor dream of a night on a sleepless bed
Of waves, with their terrible wrecks o'erspread.

We sit round the hearth as red as gold,
   And the legends beloved we tell,
How battles were won by the nobles bold,
   Where hamlets of villains fell:
And we praise our God, while we cut the bread,
And share the wine round, for our heroes dead.

And we talk of the Kings, those strong proud men,
   Who ravaged, confessed, and died;
And of churls who rabbled them oft and again,
   Perchance with a kindred pride—
Though the Kings built churches to pierce the sky,
And the rabbling churls in the cross-road lie.

Yet 'twixt the despot and slave half-free,
   Old Truth may have message clear;
Since the hard black yew, and the lithe young tree,
   Belong to an age—and a year,
And though distant in might and in leaf they be,
   In right of the woods, they are near.

And old Truth's message, perchance, may be:
"Believe in thy kind, whate'er the degree,
Be it King on his throne, or serf on his knee,
While Our Lord showers light, in his bounty free,
On the rock and the vale—on the sand and the sea"