On this Sunday evening while looking through Chambers's Journal I came upon chapters of a serial called "The War Trail,' by Captain Mayne Reid. Glimpses of it showed that it was no ordinary tale. The tales of the ghosts, the precipice, the duel, and the clanging bed were full of images of power and of terror, but in this tale, "The War Trail,' a man was writing of real life, out of a great experience, with what then seemed to me to be the intensest color. I turned to the beginning of the story and read the opening chapter, or rather the prelude to the symphony.

The first paragraph vanquished me. I read on and on till bedtime, reading every word, whether I understood it or not, because of the color and strangeness which seemed to come with each word into the mind. I read as far as the twelfth chapter that night; the next day I read on in all spare moments till I had finished it. Then I began again upon it, and afterwards recommenced upon particular bits, the adventure with the prairie fire, the stalking of Moro by the grizzly bear, and the last adventure of the hero, the entering into the Indian camp in disguise.

Boys like books that open their horizons. Nowadays the books they love are about aeroplanes and airships, 'wind-shouldering airships,' from which the earth looks like a mouldy chess board. We had not that freedom in the past. Then the great plain of Texas was the horizon, the fenceless plain, over which Mangas Coloradas still rode with his troop to take the scalps of the paleface.

[The New Statesman]

THE DEATH OF ST. MARTIN

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

WHERE the River Loire runs shallow over its broad bed, broken by wil- ** lowed banks of sand that stand above the summer stream and are in winter spates drowned up to their topmost branches; where it goes between sharp, low, green hills, on either side full of caves that are a habitation for men all down its valley by Tours there was a murmuring and a noise. It was November, and there were storms in the valley. The suddenly-risen water drummed against the wooden piles of t the long bridge and was swirling brown and thick up to the lower branches of the trees on the islands. Nor could a boat go easily against it, though towed by strong horses.

Men were passing backward and forward to the north and to the south over that long bridge of trestles from Tours the town- Tours with low roofs of spread red tiles to the caves upon the further shore where was a hive of monks, the monks all out of their cells to-day, eagerly catching the news in the market-place. The very old man, Martin, the Bishop of the city, was dying at Candes, miles away up river. He had not been able to come back to his own.

He was more than a king here, for he was also an ambassador of Heaven, and when he had gone along the streets muttering to himself and blessing rapidly those who knelt before him, the people felt that they had met something not only a man. The Emperor's Count who took the Pleas was small before him. The city held to him, and it was his own.

These walls of Tours were filled not only with his long presence, but with the stories, grown greater through days

of pilgrimage, of his strange missions into the Eastern Woods — into the Morvan and the dark Vosges; of dead men risen, and of lights seen in the sky. Also the army remembered him, because he had been a soldier. The quarters outside the walls told tales of him, the cantonments where the huts of the barbaric soldiers were, and whence passed into and out of the gates of the city the gentlemen, their officers, and the chieftains their rulers, marked upon their armor with silver and with gold. There were both songs and stories of how Martin fifty years before had ridden at the head of a column in his purple cloak, and those who had visited the German mountains and his father's valley by the Danube, could remember the portents of his birth.

Up there at Candes, Martin in his old age was dying, with some priests about him and the monks of a new house. He lay stretched upon a bed of reeds, still muttering to himself in a sort of sleep, the very old man; they watched for his passing as they stood around, and it seemed to them as though Heaven was leaning and touching earth to make a way for the ascent of his spirit. All the Church of Gaul was centred here in his starved and broken body and three full generations which had seen Gaul changed from the Pagan to the Christian thing. He still muttered faintly to himself upon his bed of reeds.

Within his closed mind, which no longer received the voices of this world, there passed great dreams or memories; his perpetual wandering over the earth in the pursuit of his Lord filled Martin now as he lay dying. He saw landscape after vivid landscape in which he stood outside himself, and perceived himself as a figure in the midst and remembered all his time.

He felt, as his mind so wandered, a VOL. 21-NO. 1088

strong horse beneath him, and he was upon that very straight western road which came up to the western gate of Amiens, striking from the Beauvaisis. He was a young soldier. He was not much more than a boy. Against the metal scales of his jerkin the sword hilt tinkled as he rode; the air was keen with winter; there were dark clouds over the east and a great menace of snow. The rolling upland was bare right up to the brick wall of the city. He saw the half-round bastions and a gate between. His mount moved impatiently through the biting wind. And as he went he saw crouching at the gate of the city that Beggar Man the memory of whose eyes had glorified his life thenceforward. He remembered the look, and how, with shame, but compelled by a fire within him, and looking up to watch whether the guard had noted an officer's folly, he had quickly cut his coat with his sword and thrown the fragment of warmth down to the half-naked man. He saw, he saw, the eyes still following him through the gate not only with gratitude, not only with benediction, but also with transfiguration. Now he was riding on into the town, ashamed in his mangled accoutrement, hiding the ludicrous short coat as best he could with his left bridle arm, but still thinking of those eyes. And Martin, lying there dying after nearly sixty years, murmured so that men around him could hear the words: 'It was the Lord! Martin, it was the Lord!'

Next, he was in the deep woods of the Aeduans, high up in the hills, three days and more from posting houses and from stone roads. The forest was damp all about him. He was in a clearing with two priests, his companions. And the wilder men of the hills were watching him sullenly while he broke their uncouth idol with an axe and preached to them the living God. But

as he watched them he doubted their mood, and as he went back down the hills he feared their following him. Even the chief whom he had baptized he feared. Then all those trees quite faded, and he was in a place where the magnificence of the Emperor shone: a huge figure, too strong and squat, with a bull neck corded and the heavy flushed face of exaggerated command. And he saw standing richly clothed amid a group of clients the dark, eager, furtive, not sane, face of Priscillian; he, Martin, pleaded for the life of that Spanish man.

Lying so in his weakness and dying, the Bishop's lips tried to frame the cry which came but as a whisper, though a whisper shrill within the soul: 'The Church will have no blood! Priscillian also is a Bishop! The Church will have no blood!' And again he stood in the forum outside the palace wall at Treves, standing ashamed and with bent head, defeated, while the crowd came laughing and jostling by from the execution of the magician of Spain. He stood there alone and balked, knowing that Priscillian's blood had been shed and that he had been powerless.

Next, time rolled back within him and he was but just free of his uniform, still so very young and full of his first fervors. Behind him were high mountains blending white with snow against the Italian sky, and about him the meres, the ditches, the reeds, the low lines of trees, and the hot noon of Lombardy. The wide imperial road ran right before him for a mile and more. He limped along it to where, at the end of his long and lonely journey, were the splendors, the high colonnades, and the clangor of Milan. And even as he went wholly bound up within himself and considering his mission from the Lord, he felt again that great fear which is not of this

world and which some say stands at the threshold of every death. His heart began to faint in him, and his thews were loosened so that he could hardly stand. There was evil all around, and that awful presence of the pit. . .

Martin, the very old Bishop, groaned in his dream and turned upon the reeds whereon he lay, so that the priests about him thought his agony had come. Within his mind he was still upon that Milan road, and still the oppression of evil grew, and still the dreadful mastery of the abyss and of things condemned.

Then he heard once more right through him in its deep tones as he had heard it then, in his boyhood, the challenge of Hell, bidding him answer whither he was bound and what business he purposed to do. Martin, as he lay there dying, was again himself of those days, and found himself answering again from within: 'O thou Foul Beast! I go to do the work of my Lord.' And again the mortal cold seized him everywhere as he felt vibrating through his being, not heard by mortal ears, the mighty challenge of the receding ghost: 'Martin, I will thwart you every way, and I will defeat you in the end.'

The despairs seized him even as that Lombard landscape faded within his closed mind. He came back to age. He was in the article of death. He had opened his eyes.

The old man raised himself upon one elbow a little and stared all about. He saw the room and the priests about him; one moved forward as though to touch him, but the others held him back. A young man but lately tonsured, an Angevin from the Valley, said with sobs: 'Oh, my Father, do you not know me?'

Martin, seeing that young face, smiled for a moment, but outwards

only, for within the terror had returned. Though he now saw real men and the very walls of the stone room wherein he lay, and the true sky beyond the open arches, a November northern sky of driving cloud, yet was he still in the presence of that Terror. He called out in a loud voice challenging it: "Thou Foul Beast! I say to thee again, Thou Foul Beast! What power hast thou over me? I have faithfully served my Lord, and I have done many and wonderful things for Him.'

When the old man had said this so loudly, and while those about him were drawing back, many crossed themselves, feeling a combat of great power passing before them. They saw their father lose all restraint of terror, and his limbs relax, and the falling upon his face of an awful dignity, which at the last relapsed into a stern, but conquering, smile. Next he lay backward and was dead.

That evening they watched and at the turn of the night said Mass, and they absolved the body laid out upon a bier before the Altar, and surrounded as custom is with lights.

When the morning came they put the body of Martin upon a boat draped with hangings, as fitted the greatness of the man, of his office, and of all the evangelization of the Gauls. Certain skilful men having been chosen from among the River people to guide the boat over the turning of the flood water, they brought it down to Tours, and there they buried him amid a great concourse of the people, and all his monks were there, lamenting him from the caves beyond the River. Then, when some years had passed, the devotion of his successors built a little chapel over that famous grave, and a Bishop from foreign parts sent a sculptured marble for the tomb, and later still another church was raised in memory of the Apostle.

And one hundred years, and another hundred years, and another went by to the added glory of his tomb until a thousand years had passed. Then enemies came and ruined it. And when it had risen again in splendor above him the enemies came again, after another two hundred years, and ruined it again, leaving it all desolate and bare walls. At last only two towers stood of what had been his shrine. But for the third time, and that in our day, men built up the shrine again, and there it is as you may see it if you go to Tours. And so it will be perhaps for many lives of men to come, the church rising and falling, and the tomb of Martin continuing in the midst.

[The English Review] WOMEN AND THE WORLD FUTURE

BY CICELY HAMILTON

VERY few, I imagine, will contradict the statement that our present civilization can be saved to the world only by an effort of mankind. That effort will have to be both strenuous and patient; and to its making must go something more than good will the utmost intelligence of humanity. We cannot afford to leave idle and derelict any force that may control - however slightly—the impulse to destroy which is the natural expression of the mass-mind stirred to emotion. Half a dozen years of mass-emotion and massaction have laid great part of Europe in ruins and shaken the foundations whereon human society is builded— and the process of destruction appears likely to renew itself indefinitely. The 'vicious circle' is not confined to wages and the cost of living; politics, internal and international, consist largely in the organization and counter-organization of mass-emotion—that is to say, in

the welding of explosive material into efficient fighting machines. All organizations are fighting machines; and, so far, our only method of dealing with the tyranny of one variety is to set up another against it-produce bellicose Labor as a check on bellicose Nationality. The real problem, perhaps, being how to disorganize the mind of humanity; how induce it to tear off its labels, forgo its destructive mass-action, think constructively and not to order. Be that as it may, it is clear that Society in peril from its own destructive impulses has a right to expect some help from that section of humanity which, because it bears children gives life-should esteem life highly, hold bloodshed and slaughter in abhorrence. The direct influence of the mother of men so at least we were told in days gone by- would make for the peace of the world. There was a 'protective instinct' much talked about at one time . . . and which, so far, has been curiously inactive-ineffectual and modestly silent. The woman pacifist, for instance, would seem, for the most part, to be a replica of her male colleague; as good a fighter, and with little indication of a point of view that in any way differs from his. Hardly in one have I come across a trace of the difference that must exist between the outlook and attitude of the man who hates war, and the woman; the difference, that is to say, between the outlook of the born non-combatant and of one who is potentially a fighter. How the difference might express itself is another question; but it exists and would find expression if women were more honest with themselves.

Those who belong to the fighting half of humanity have the right, if they will, to belittle the emotion which impels their fellows to offer their lives for a cause; but if the protective instinct, the sense of the su

preme value of life, were a reality in woman an effective reality— their opposition to war would come from a different motive; it would come from a sense of the splendor of the sacrifice and the unworthiness of society their own unworthiness— to accept it. Opposition so motived might be no more successful than previous efforts to quell and master the indomitable fighting spirit; but at least it would be something new in the history of pacifism. And it would have this merit; it would be founded in humility, not arrogance.

Neither man nor society in general has any right to expect from those who are new to public interests and habits of thought a sudden and definite lead on matters which have torn and perplexed humanity since humanity existed upon earth; but what we have a right to expect is a stirring of heart among women in the face of a world catastrophe with, as its natural result, anxiety for the future, inquiry, the quickening of imagination—and a casting about for ways and means of ensuring the safety of the generation to come. Which, with time, and experiment-and preliminary failuremight mean help. . . . That is all we should expect, so far; but we have a right to expect that.

There were not many signs of it during the war; and it may be that much of the routine and organizing work done by women was done all the better by reason of a narrow outlook, a capacity for interesting themselves only in the business in hand, for putting the war aside while they worked at their important little bit of it. Lack of imagination has its very practical uses; there are times when it is advisable to take short views and live from day to day. Where the reverse side of the quality showed itself was in the frequent inability to realize suffering