and to judge the amount of fall. While this
was doing, Giles worked his hands—all that
were free of him—up and down rapidly in the
attitude of prayer. The chaplain was reading
a prayer. The reporters said he prayed. They
were wrong. I was close to him, and I heard
what he said. His words were addressed to
Calcraft. "Tell me, mister—be I goin' now?"

"No," said the executioner; " I'll tell you
when."

The prayer was done.

"Tell me, mister," said Giles again, "be I
goin' now?"

"No," said Calcraft. " I'll give you a sign.
When I shake hands with you, you will have
just half a minute left."

The chaplain knelt to pray with Giles. Giles
did not or would not hear.

"Be I goin' NOW?" he said.

Calcraft came and shook his pinioned hand.
"God bless you!" he said, gently, " for it is
NOW!" and he slipped away.

Then the old man woke up; all his senses
quickened by the knowledge that only one half
minute of precious life remained—only one
half minute! Till now he had been numbed and
lulled into the belief that it was a long way off.
Now it was come. He broke out, as rapidly as
he could gabble:

"Oh Lord, have mercy on my poor soul!
Oh Lord, have mercy on my poor soul! Oh
Lord, have—"

Cr, chunk! And there was a fall, and
something was swaying to and fro, to and fro, till at
last it became steady, and twisted from right
to left, from left to right. And there was the
noise of a crowd that had been silent, that drew
a long sighing breath of relief, and woke up
into life to go about its business.

LEAVES FROM THE MAHOGANY TREE.
RISE AND PROGRESS OF FRENCH COOKING.

YOUR practised historian can, as is well
known, make a very pretty whipped cream by
beating together half-a-dozen theories seasoned
with two or three facts cut into very thin slices
for garnishing. But this dish is too light and
unsatisfying for some stomachs, and we
therefore regret that so little has been preserved to
enable us to form any sound conclusion as to
the sorts of cooking that nourished and
delighted the French of the dark ages.

The old Roman and Greek cooks went out at
one door when the howling Norsemen and their
raven banner broke in at the other. The days
of epicurean glory were followed by a long and
terrible obscurity, as Brillat Saverin says in his
own exquisite way:

"At the apparition of these fierce strangers
the alimentary art disappeared with the other
sciences of which it is both the companion and
the consoler. The greater part of the cooks were
massacred in the palaces which they had
nourished; others fled to avoid being
compelled to regale the oppressors of their country;
the few who offered their services had the
mortification of seeing them rejected. The
ferocious mouths, the scorched throats, were
insensible to the charms of refined cooking.
Enormous joints of meat and sides of venison,
with immeasurable quantities of the strongest
liquors sufficed to please them; and as the
usurpers were always armed, most of their
repasts degenerated into orgies, and the banquet
hall too often swam with blood."

Gradually civilisation stole in and parted the
ponderous joints into humanising side dishes.
Friends were invited not to glut their hunger,
but to be regaled. The great Charlemagne, amid
his dreams of European empire, took a personal
interest in his table; and it appears from his
Capitularies that he studied wisely and
carefully the epicurean resources of his vast domains.

The French kings, contemporaneous with our
Henrys and Edwards, gave a gallant and
chivalrous character to their entertainments, as
we see in Froissart. There was great luxury
and splendour too at the table of John of France,
and at that of the early Louis.

Both at Paris and Windsor the knights of
those days saw with exultation the pheasants
with gilt claws, or the peacocks with emerald
and purple plumes outspread, borne through
the castle hall by pages glittering with gold,
while the warriors, bound on deeds of high
emprise, flashed out their swords, and vowed to
save Bordeaux or storm Beauvais in the name
of "The Peacock and the Ladies." Now that
women had come back to the dining-table to
humanise society by their presence there were
hopes for good and refined cooking once more.

In such wealthy and luxurious courts as
those of the Sforza, the Borgias, and the
Medici, cooking soon became a high art. We
must recal the domestic pictures of
Bellini, of Titian, and of Giorgione to realise
the banquets of those times. The spices that
the Venetians brought from the East came
in excellently to heighten the flavours and
strengthen the taste of the happy inspirations
of the new art. The palate, too, of our
ancestors differed in its liking from ours. The
pre-Raphaelite Italians liked to flavour their ragouts
with the perfumed waters of Arabia and Moorish
Spain, and they sometimes boiled fish in
rose-water. Even down to Elizabeth's reign this
unnatural taste continued, and ambergris was
largely used in cooking at the tables of the
great. Indeed the good time came on so fast,
that the French kings were soon obliged to
issue sumptuary laws, which met with the usual
fate of all attempts to bridle fashion or to
restrain luxury.

The crusades had at least this one result,
that the French crusaders bore with reverent
hands the shalotte from the sandy battle plains
of Ascalon and brought it to the European
kitchen. There can be no question than the
science of modern French cooking is an edifice
of many stories, which the great and wise of
many centuries built up stone by stone. The