will sing together for gladness in the dawn of life, the spring-time will still return for happy lovers, and in the intervals of strife and toil, mirth and laughter will still resound in the chequered shade.

Life is not all disappointment, and not all pleasures turn to dust and ashes. Happiness, contentment, and delight in a task courageously attempted, whether crowned by success or consecrated by failure, are not so rare as Hardy would have us believe. That no "human being deserves less The Fortnightly Review.

than is given" may be true in one sense; but in another and deeper sense it must be remembered that if everyone got his deserts none would escape a whipping. Surely the true view is that the darkness in life, like the darkness in the solar year, is fairly evenly balanced with light; and to create this ultimate impression and no other is the task that lies before the novelist who is to stand as high in the world of prose fiction as Shakespeare stands in the drama. Wilfred S. Durrant.

We were homeward bound, four days in front of Christmas, over a flat sea blinding with reflected sunshine, congratulating ourselves on a record winter passage into London. There is but one aphorism at sea which comfortably fits most circumstances: "One never knows."

It might have been June. The pallid blue overhead was hung with flimsy white tapestries, suspended in set loops and folds, too thin to veil the sun, whose track over the sea, down which we were bowling at eleven knots, was incandescent silver. A shade had to be erected over the binnacle for the wheelsman. A few sailing vessels were idling about the bright plain, their canvas hanging like tablecloths. The steamer went over a level keel, with no movement but the tremor of the engines, and our wash astern ran in two straight white lines out of sight. The day had been made for us; we could be home before midnight, for we should just catch the tide at the Shipwash light and go up on top of it towards Billingsgate.

It was the strange sunset which gave us the first warning. A vague silver flare fell obliquely down behind the

The sea was empty of all traffic. We had the North Channel, one of the busiest routes in the world, entirely to ourselves.

"It looks as though London had been wiped out since we left it," said the skipper.

The Maplin watched us pass in the dusk with its one red eye. We raised all the lights clear and bright. The run was still straight and free. Later, we were sitting round the saloon table, calculating whether she would catch the last train for us, when everybody jumped at the unexpected clang of the engine-room bell. "Stop her," heard the man cry, at the telegraph below. We crowded the companion in an effort to reach deck together, and

we

the bell rang often enough, while we were arriving, to drive the staff below distracted.

I got to the side in time to see a huge liner's dim shape slide by like a street at night; she would have been invisible but for her row of lights. We could have reached her on a gangway. The man at our wheel was spinning his spokes desperately to avoid banging into vessels we could not see, but whose bells were ringing everywhere about us. We had run full tilt into a fog bank apparently packed with ships, and were saving ourselves and them by guesswork while stopping the way on our boat. The veiled moon was looking over the wall of the fog, and the stars above our deck were bright. But our hull was shoving into a murk which was as opaque as cheese, and had the same flavor. From all directions came the quick ringing of the bells of frightened vessels. Twice across our bows appeared perilous shadows, sprinkled with dim stars, and then high walls went slowly by us. I don't know how long it was before our boat came to a stand, but it was long enough for us. You imagined the presence in the dark of impending bodies, and straining over-side to see them, listening to the sucking of the invisible water, nervously fanned the fog in a ridiculous effort to clear it.

Down our anchor dropped at last, and our own bell then rang as a sign to the invisible flock that we too were harmless. As soon as our unseen neighbors heard our exhaust humming, their continued frantic ringing subsided, and only occasionally they gave a shaking to hear if we answered from the same spot; until at last there was absolute silence, as though all had crept silently away, and left us alone there. So we waited with our riding lights. Our usual lights were only shrouded, for we were fully confident there would be a clearance presently. But

the rampart of the fog built itself up, covered the moon, and finally robbed us of the overhead stars. Imprisoned by the thick walls we lay till morning, listening to the doleful tolling of the Mucking bell.

Next morning showed but a weak diffusion of day through a yellow screen. It required a prolonged look to mark even the dead water over-side. Fog is the most doleful of all set weirds. For nearly a fortnight we had been without rest. We had become used to a little house which was always unstable, and sometimes riotous, between a flying floor and sky. And I was now reeling giddily on a motionlessly dead-level, with soundless unseen waters below, and a blind dumb world all round. We watched impatiently the slow drift of the fog motes for a change of wind. But the rigging was hoary with frost and the deck was glazed with ice. There was but small hope it would lift. We were interned. Overdue already; within eight miles of a station from which we could be home in thirty minutes; and next week might find us still fretting in our prison.

Sometimes the fog would seem to rise a few feet. The brutal deception was played on us many times, and found us willing victims. A dark cork drifting by some distance out made a focal point in the general yellow and gave an appearance of clearance. Once, parading the deck prison as the man on watch-there was nothing to do but to keep a good look-out and ring the bell at intervals -I made sure I should be the harbinger of good tidings to those below playing cards. A dim line appeared to starboard, and gradually became definite, like a coast showing through a thinning haze. They all came up to watch it. The coast got higher and darker; and then suddenly changed into a long wide trail of floating cin

ders. The fog curtains moved closer than ever again. We were the centre of a dead world, and our own place a quiet and narrow tomb. Our scared neighbors of the night before seemed to have gone. But presently an invisible boat near us, hilariously lachrymose, produced in a series of horrible moans from her steam tooter the tunes of "Auld Lang Syne" and "Home Sweet Home." A hidden river audience shouted with cheerful laughter. It quite brightened us to hear the prisoners jolly in the next cell. But for the rest of the day the place was mute, the fog deepened to ochre at evening, then became black, excepting where the riding lights made circles of luminous gauze. Every miserable watcher who came down that night, muffled and frost-sparkled, for a drink of hot coffee, just drank it and went on deck again without a word. There was no need to ask him anything.

The next morning came suffused through the same dense cloud, which still drifted by on a light air, interminable. Our prison seemed shorter than ever. Once only that day a fancied clearance showed our skipper a lane on the water. He up-anchored and moved on a hundred yards. The mute river rang immediately with a tumult of bells.

We had a perishable cargo, we were ready to take any chance sooner than stay where we were, so when a deck hand on the third morning came down with the thawing fog dripping from his moustache, and told the skipper it was clearing a little, everybody tumbled up to station at once.

I saw from the Speedwell as rare and unearthly a picture as will ever fall to my lot. The bluish twilight of dawn seemed to radiate from our vessel's sides, revealing, through the thinning veil, a vague, still world without floor, ceiling or walls. There was no water, except a small oval on which the Speed

well sat like a show model on glass; no sky, and no horizon.

The cosmos was grouped about our centre, inert, voiceless, full of unawakened surprising shapes, such as we could not have dreamed of; those near to us more approaching our former experiences, those on the increasing outer radii diminishing in the opaque dawn to grotesque indeterminate things, beyond all remembrance and recognition. We only were substantial and definite. But placed about us, suspended in translucent night, were the vertical shadows of what once were ships, but were steamers and sailers without substance now, shrouded spectres that had left the wrecks of their old hulls below, their voyages finished, and had been raised to our level in a new place boundless and serene, with the inconceivable profundities beneath; and there we kept them suspended on one plane by superior gravity and body, as though we were the sun of this new system in the heavens. Above them was void, and beyond were the blind distances of the outer world, and below the abyss of space still. Their lights reached out and gathered to our centre, an incoming of shining ropes, the spiritual mooring lines.

Our cable, crawling upwards through the hawse pipe, shattered the spell; and when our hooter warned that we were moving, a wild pealing commenced which continued all the long slow drift down to Gravesend. Eight miles of ships, and no doubt we commenced far from the end of the procession. Barges, colliers, liners, clippers, ghost after ghost shaped ahead and glided astern. Several times the fog thickened again, but the skipper never took way off her while he could make a course with the sight of a ship ahead, for our cargo could not be trifled with, our vessel was small, and our captain had nerves of iron. We drifted stern first on the flood, with half turns of the propeller

for steering purchase, till a boatman told us we were off Gravesend. I took no more risks. That boat was exactly what I was longing for.

It was something to have the steady paving-stones under one's feet again. The English Review.

You would never imagine how lovely are naphtha flares in the fog, and the dingy people in the muddy ways, and the houses which are always in the same place. It was substance at last, and security.

H. M. Tomlinson.

IV.

OF THE FINDING OF THE TREASURE.

Know that this Château of Aumur was built upon a great hill, which riseth from the north gently towards the gray walls; but, upon the southern battlements, one standing could throw a stone and hear it crash into the tree tops five hundred feet below. Paths up these southerly heights were there none save for the surest of foot, and even by these was the cliff, in many places, held unscaleable.

Here, hanging over the green branches of he forest, like a peregrine in his eyry, sat Pierre of the Scar, dangling his long legs over three hundred feet of nothingness. He had dined well upon venison, the day was fine, he was, in the main, well-favored toward the world. Yet he had one thing upon which to ponder. For he had received at his door, that morn, none else than the Lord Thibaut, who had put before him the matter of service at the castle. To this he had some mind, but he had objected to his lord that he, a married man, did by no means desire to leave his wife.

Thibaut had said "Ha!" three times. He could surely have forced Pierre to his service, but that was not his way with real men. Wherefore he, seeking the willing obedience of his big vassal, had answered that a place among the women of the castle might be found for her. This, however, would Pierre in no way allow, for he thought the Château no dwelling for

proper women, nor did he hesitate to say so. At which saying Thibaut had laughed, and, after commanding Jeanne to come forward for appraisement, told his man that indeed she would be in no danger, and that, though to his knowledge she had been the Helen of the late rising, yet he could not wholly commend the taste of his lamented uncle, who, indeed, was in dotage when death mercifully delivered him. But the matter of body service was pressed no more, Thibaut riding away in some slight chagrin. He would, doubtless, find means, without compulsion (for that was his curious whim), to change Pierre's resolution. By making his farm of little profit to the knave did the Lord of Aumur hope to win his way, and, at the same time divert himself to some small extent.

Now, as Pierre sat, pondering these things, and looking up, and down, and about, his glance fell upon that which drove all things else from his mind. Thrust stiffly from an over-hanging ledge fifty feet above was a clenched hand, and Pierre stood up, straining his eyes, in great amaze at the prodigy. Strange indeed he thought it, this hand grasping at the wind which flowed up the castle heights, and, moved by its strangeness, he aimed at the closer beholding of it. So unto the right along the narrow shelf he sidled most cautiously, and thereby came very near unto his death, for the rotten,

weathered rock broke away from his foot. "Twas indeed well for him that he was strong; all his great strength being needed to draw him back to safety again. Then to the left he essayed passage, but again was no way of ascent. Leading most perilously from one of the lower ledges, at length he found a path, and, after much travail of hard climbing, reached the place of his seeking.

There lay a body, half in, half out of a little cave which gave upon the cliffface, and in the shadow further back he dimly saw another. The rags of clothing fluttered ghastly in the thin breeze, the fleshless face stared grimly into the blue; upon the skull a shrewd sword-cut had done violence. Out of all knowledge had the birds of the air torn the face, but well Pierre knew the body; Adelbert, the German steward of Aumur, had been no friend of his. Nor upon turning over the second man did he find one that he loved; bow-legged Michel, body servant to the younger son of the old Baron, had once brought him a whipping. And now, here they lay beyond his hate or their friends' love.

Pierre, having examined these two poor remnants, passed into the cavern. Deep he knew it was, for he heard his footsteps echo back from afar in the bowels of the hill. Very cautiously, therefore, he went, fearing pitfalls in the black darkness. Yet not so warily but that, some twenty paces from the entrance, he fell over that which, as his foot stumbled against it, he knew was a wooden box. Of a sudden, a thought came into his mind which set his heart beating thickly, and, the blood humming in his ears, he tried to drag this chest unto the light; but it was too heavy a burden even for such strength as his. Therefore, still in darkness, he felt for the crack of the lid, and having found it, opened the box with ease, for it was unlocked.

And putting his hand within, he felt that which he had expected to find; that which, cold itself, yet warmeth the heart of any man: the chill of broad pieces against his finger-tips. A double handful he clutched, and, careless of what spilled ringing to the floor, stumbled, blind with great joy, to the light of the cave-mouth. Verily, it was gold. The treasure of Aumur had been found.

Pierre came suddenly into his right mind again as the mist of evening began to trickle heavily among the treetops below his perch. This cliff was no place for climbing by night. So setting aside speculation, he addressed himself to the finding of footholds and hand-grips, for he had no mind to die now that within his grasp lay the wherewithal to easy living. One thing was sure. It was no part of his plan to render up his secret unto the rightful owner of the treasure. Upon silence he was resolute.

As he walked homeward through the darkling woods, he decided wisely upon his course of action. He would not attempt to move the chest from where it lay. For what place could be more secure? It was evident that the present Lord had no knowledge of the secret ways in the solid rock beneath the keep. He would, God willing, die a gray beard without coming to that knowledge. Unless Pierre led him thereto. At which pleasant and fantastical idea, Pierre slapped his jingling wallet and smiled comfortably. So he would take some store, a matter of pockets full, to bury beneath his hearth against a turn of fortune, drawing upon the chest as present need arose.

This problem of disposal solved, came a second, but of a philosophic interest merely: the chances which had left the treasure of Aumur abandoned in a cave in the cliff-face, without any guard save only the poor defence of