mine in noonday. And (I do not pretend to
explain these phenomena, and can hardly
expect to obtain credence, though it was so)
I knew his thoughts. O! the mortal agony
that it was to know them and be unable to
stir hand or foot to prevent their execution!

Gently and cautiously he put the
bedclothes aside; gently and cautiously he
stepped over me. I lay watching him through
an awful medium which dispensed with
ordinary means. One long look out at the
troubled midnight sky, another at the mirror
—what dreadful attraction was there in his
own face, then, I wonder?—and he stole
across the darkened floor and out of the
room. My preternatural vision followed him.

Up the black staircase. To my uncle's
room!

The blood surged and throbbed in my brain.
There was a dazzling flash as of polished steel
before my eyes and then a great darkness.
With a cry of horror, I awoke, my hair
bristling. My brother's place was vacant.

I slipped from the bed and stole after him,
a mortal terror in my heart, my blood
congealing to ice, my knees knocking together.
In the midnight blackness his outstretched
hands met mine—wet with what I knew
must be blood!

Why should I write more? Boy as he
was, he died on the gallows, myself barely
escaping the same fate. Katy, waking up to
that night of horror, never closed her eyes in
the sweet sleep of health or sanity again.
My life has been passed in self-banishment
from my native land. I am a lonely old man,
the last of my race. And my story is told.

DWELLERS IN TENTS.

ON the fourteenth of November, eighteen
hundred and fifty-four, a furious tornado blew
down all the tents of the allied armies before
Sebastopol. Only the round tents of the
Turkish soldiers were left standing. This set
Captain Rhodes a-thinking, and the
product of which operation is an interesting
book on tents and tent-life, from which we
have arranged the following extracts.

All Eastern nations are, or have been, more
or less nomadic in their habits, and all therefore
from very early time have used tents.
Jabal was the father of these future generations
of tenters. Abraham and Isaac, Laban
and Jacob sat in tents, which, for the most
part, it is supposed, were covered with the
skin of a certain Red Sea fish, resembling
chamois leather, although translated in the
English Bible as badger's skin.

A wooden hut covered with reeds served
Achilles for a tent, when he lay before Troy,
while the Grecian soldiers housed themselves
beneath skins. The Macedonians had small
tents, to hold but two soldiers each, also
covered with skins; these tents being an exact
prefiguration of our author's own invention
in his Tentes d'Abri, but used as buoys
or rafts when crossing rivers. Alexander's
pavilion contained a hundred beds. This was
the most gorgeous canvas home ever seen.
The roof was covered with gilded arabesques,
and supported by eight golden pillars. In the
centre was the golden throne guarded by the
body-guard of five hundred picked men, all
in glowing colours and gorgeous gold-
embroidery. It was the most wonderful
thing of its kind extant, but was equalled, if
not surpassed, by the magnificence which
Nadir-Shah set up above his head. Of which
more hereafter.

The Romans had hut-like tents covered
with skins, and curtained at the entrance;
each tent, ten Roman feet in breadth, and
capable of holding ten privates and a
subaltern. When opened at the front
and back, and with the valances lifted
up, they looked like enormous butterflies;
and were called butterflies (papiliones) in
consequence. Nero had an octagon tent of
singular beauty; but Nero had many
beautiful and rare things: his emerald opera-
glass not the least noteworthy of them. Tents
in Cæsar's time were very much like what
they are now in shape; some like our hospital-
tents, and some like our bell-tents, and
others hut shaped with sloping roofs, skin-
covered and curtained; and others again
of canvas—great canvas butterflies. The
Scythian race of Bald Heads slept in winter
under trees covered with a strong white
cloth; but, in summer, under trees without
any covering at all.

Who thinks of an Arab without his camel,
his mare, and his tent? Take away one of
those, and he would be no more the Bedouin
we have all known of from our earliest youth,
and not a few of us envied when nature and
instinct rebelled against the restraints of
society. An Arab in a carpeted house, with
its proper complement of chairs and tables,
and stuffed feather-beds, would be as
completely vulgarised as the most common-place
among us would desire. Even Bedouin life
comes to be a matter of canvas and properties,
like everything else in this complex old
theatre we call the world. An Arab family-tent
is from twenty-five to thirty feet in
length, by about ten feet in breadth; in the
highest parts it is from ten to seven feet, in the
lower about five. It has nine poles: three
in the middle and three on each side, covered
at the top with thick cloths of woven goat's
hair, impervious to the heaviest rain. The
side-coverings are usually of coarse wool.
The interior is divided into two apartments
by means of a white woollen flower-embroidered
curtain, hung against the middle poles,
one side being for men, the other for the
women. In the first, also, are the wheat-sacks,
camel-bags and pack-saddles heaped
up like a pyramid round the centre post;
and, in the second one, the water and butter-
skins, kitchen utensils, and all the more