to lip, lowered it and stayed him with uplifted hand.

"'Mornin' t'ye, sir; ye'll be meetin' two o' my fares below, a tall gentleman and a smaller: might I be so bold as to arst ye to bid 'em to hurry up for my time's take?"

By the

Justin would do so with pleasure. He covered himself and bade them good-day. The fog thickened between them as he passed on, muting the guard's gruff and the lady's sweeter respouse. His mare's withers sunk and sunk as each shortening step committed her to the unseen descent. quick patter of multitudinous falling drops, he knew that he must be in the heart of a woodland; the solitude of a fog enwrapped him—a lonely, unsatisfactory, half silence, filled with small, distracting sounds, and broken presently and abruptly by the crack of a whip down below.

That young face of innocent wonder went with him. "A sweet girl to look upon, surely a good girl," he mused. "Will my girl, when I find her, be such another? They will be much of an age, I should say." And therewith he fell to thinking of how little he knew of young women of any color, and least of all of the young women of bis own race.

Cautiously went the mare, keeping her quarters well under her, butting with lowered head into the smother, winding as the road wound, setting down foot after foot firmly into deep, damp sand; her good brown eyes upon the track ahead of her, but her nostrils wide and her ears cocked forward, for there was a tang in the wet air that puzzled, a rank, smoky smatch which she could not explain to herself. Her rider detected her anxiety and watched her ears. Pit-a-pat fell the drops, deadening smaller sounds. Then, close at hand, began a sing-song recitative interrupted by sniffs, and rounding a black holly-bush which held

the fog like a sponge and dripped from every glossy leaf, the mare checked suddenly with a strong shudder. Justin's hand went out to his hostler, but was as promptly withdrawn. In the inidst of the way, not ten yards below him, lay a man bareheaded, save for a black vizard, a touch that told all; the rogue, whoever he might be, and however he had come there, had fallen to some sudden and mortal stroke without struggle, nor had so much as raised a hand. A hat lay near. Instantly Justin was aware that beyond the body knelt a man with bare white face drawn with fear, gabbling prayers with lips which seemed scarcely under control, whilst behind him, less distinct, through moving threads of vapor, with hand upon his shoulder, keeping him down, stood a bigger man. Both were uncovered. This last seemed a person of resource. "Sir-who the devil-?" he rapped. "Put up your hands, or" he dived for a weapon in some inner pocket.

"Needless, sir," replied Justin, uncovering, "but under the circumstances excusable. I can see how it stands."

"Ye may that, honust man," cried the other heartily. "Yer pardon's begged; I was a thought hasty; for indade ye made me jump. The blayguard here'

"Stopped you?"

"He did. And I him. He has ate an half-ounce of me lead, a full male, seemin❜ly, for I got him behint the ear (I never permit mesilf to miss): ay, not a minute since. I'm wondering ye did not hear my shot."

The speaker, a robust and soldierly figure, dominantly tall, took the matter too coolly for Justin's taste. Even in Ireland (the man's tongue bewrayed him) one might be excused for showing concern at having blown the brains out of a fellow creature. None was shown here; the prayer had ceased abruptly upon the new comer's appear

ance, and the significance of the bared heads escaped him. Our friend found the man's personality antipathetic at his first glance; there was more than a touch of the victorious gladiator in his pose, a wounded gladiator too, by his bandaged arm.

"A ruse de guerre, me dear sir," laughed the Irishman, replying to Justin's unspoken inquiry. ""Tis just a dummy, an improvised ambushcade, a casual invintion, a little thing of me own. I fired from beneath ut, just as the rogue was for handling me. Indade, the dirthy fist of him was in me fob as I pulled." He tossed the stuffed sleeve as he spoke, displaying the pistol-hand it had concealed.

"Who is he?" asked Justin, peering down upon the corpse. None replied. The smaller man had arisen and was beating the sand from his knees, breathing the while in short gasps, a creature unnerved. The guard's horn

came dully from above.

"They are sounding the recall; we must be rejoining the main command, me frind," said the Irishman, who, having pouched the spoils, was in haste to be gone; turning to the rueful figure beside him, he plucked him by the sleeve with a "H-now, sor!"

"But, the body-will ye leave itso?" asked Justin.

"Faith, me dear sor, I will that. I have not a coff'n about me. Me friend here has done the needful." The man had stirred a foot, but something in the horseman's eye detained him. After a momentary survey of the hand and seat, he resumed with hauteur: "I have not the honor of knowing yer servuss, but, unless I am mightily desaved in ye, we have both of us seen prettier and honuster bhoys than this dead raparee here, left where the bullets found thim. A-there, now am I not right? Sure, I have put in me morning's wor'rk, and the townland to which I have done the

Justin turned in his saddle and watched him go with a narrowing eye. He could admire resource in self-defence, and the tense-drawn nerve which can face a loaded barrel without giving; but this went beyond him. Even in the East they did not pistol a dacoit and ride on with a laugh! 'twas butcherly.

Meanwhile, though the fog had engulfed the pair, he could hear the Irishman, whose voice had a resonant quality which carried, addressing, or perhaps rating his companion.

"Hould up, small thief that ye are, and don't be draggin' yer feet. And a wor'rd in yer ear, me frind, before we rejoin the leedy. Ye will be pleased to ride beside the coachman for the rist of this journey. D'ye ondersthand?"

The relations of this pair seemed unconventional; but Justin had other things to think of; the corpse in the rut cried mutely for pity. The poor rascal had staked his life upon the venture, and had lost it to one who chanced to be his master in address. There lay the limp, huddled figure, supine in highway dirt, the vizard awry over the upper face.

He had looked too long for his mare. She suddenly broke away sidelong with a snort of fear, boring upon the bit. Why, indeed, should he interrupt his journey? What claim had this carrion upon him? "The business is none of yours," whispered that lower nature, neither brute nor man, which dwells with each of us. "You are bound, as

it is, upon an errand of charity, to

which you stand committed in honor; you delay at risk to others as well as to yourself. A meddler stands to lose. Yonder Thing had friends while living who will not be far away, and who, coming, may misconstrue your presence, may decline to accept your explanation. What would a coroner's jury of yokels make of your story? Your loitering here courts misconception and can render no service to the dead."

Lending an ear to the tempter, whilst half-heartedly curbing his mare, Justin had been carried twenty yards down hill, and missed but little of pursuing his journey with some loss of self-esteem--the price which we pay for liberty to fall below ourselves. But the habit of a life stepped in, was not to be broken by a nervous horse and a conscience in temporary abeyance.

"'Fore George," he muttered, "except upon a forced march I could never leave a dead native to be crushed by the wheel of the next bandi. Stand, mare!" He retraced his steps, swung down, hitched his rein to a hazel, bent over the corpse, shifted the vizard, and curiously scrutinized the livid mouth and half-opened eyes. "Not a bad face .. it might have been a good face. 'Tis the face of a gentleman, and assuredly a young face. Poor lad, what brought ye to it?"

Whilst meditating, he observed that the wound behind the ear still oozed. Stripping a glove, he inserted a finger: the skull was intact, the ball had glanced. In a moment his interest, tepid hitherto, warmed. "Stunned, possibly; hardly dead. What?" for the dim eyes opened fully, the lips moved, the corpse was reviving upon his

hands.

Our friend had not followed the wars for half his life without picking up some anatomy. He knew, for example, that a ricochet off one of the basal

prominences is of no great moment unless a chief artery be cut. None had been cut here; the fellow was alive, and must be moved.

But by whom? Having bound the wound up, Justin arose and stood, considering possibilities. Twenty years earlier he had lifted from the ground the inert body of a brother-in-arms (Travis, no less), shouldered and borne it beyond the spatter of matchlock balls; but such a feat is not easy of performance. It is only in fiction that the hero snatches, or catches, the unconscious victim from the earth and bears him gallantly, yet tenderly, to safety (anything under ten miles). Fiat experimentum in corpore amici. Get some one of your size to lie flat and passive upon the carpet and do your best to get him upon the table, and you shall see. The Major, if sinewy, was slight, and no longer in his first youth. This wounded rascal was the taller and heavier man, and could be depended upon to give no assistance, no, not by the crooking of a finger; he would be mere slack, dead weight.

"What to do next?" asked Justin, and glanced anxiously about him, and then smiled, for help was at hand. A loutish country boy was peering through the hazels upon the bank above him, a grower in either hand, with a broad, half-scared, wholly worried grin upon his round, freckled face. "My lad-"

"Oye, Mister; comin'," rejoined the other, and let himself down into the road with clumsy agility, scratched his head, straddled, and spat upon his hands. 'Twas an Englishman in the making, and meant work. Justin knew the stock, and brightened, awaiting the slow-coming counsel of the native.

"Us had best brung he along to mother's," said the boy at length. ""Taint fur," he added encouragingly;

and, buttoning up a loose mouth, took the fallen man by the shoulders, a post Justin had proposed for himself.

Twice in the course of the following ten minutes the boy, wooden-faced as ever, paused for breath or to improve

his hold, but once only did he unbutton his lips.

"Mother's bin and got salvation," said he; "'tis all along o' they Methodies. Pray Gawd it hain't spyled her; she were a good 'un afore."

Ashton Hilliers.

The remarkable success of M. Barrès' latest novel, Colette Baudoche, seems to invite, not only an examination of this volume, but a survey of the author's career, which is probably now at its culminating point.

It is not easy to pronounce on M. Barrès' value as a writer, a moralist, and a man. Like everybody else, he has his qualities and his faults, the balance of which it is difficult to find. But one element in his nature and his literary life makes estimation a matter of excessive nicety. It seems impossible to take seriously most of what M. Barrès wrote before he was thirty, and yet it is certain that his fame rests largely on the very volumes which strike us to-day-as they did then-as a mystification, no matter if unconscious; add to this that they were taken seriously by M. Taine and M. Bourget both inclined, I must say, to be sometimes unduly serious-and that the more devout Barresians, as they call themselves, worship their god's early manifestations almost to the exclusion of the rest. The imposition and its success create an atmosphere unfavorable to serene criticism, and one has to nerve himself repeatedly against temptations to impatience when trying to give M. Barrès his due.

I fancy the English reader knows M. Barrès mostly as the author of Les Déracinés, and, in a more shadowy perspective, as the decadent initiator of what used to be styled in the early

nineties the Culte du Moi. The later Barrès, the author of the Lorrain books, of the apologia pro patria sua, has gradually become familiar to his countrymen, but it seems to me that his avatar has not been taken much notice of abroad. Yet it is essential to bear in mind the calm, haughty attitude of an intransigent patriot, in which M. Barrès has settled down in the last seven or eight years, before reverting to the restless young man from whom the academician and deputy has slowly been evolved. With this precaution the reader will not be wide of the mark in continuing to think of M. Barrès as the Egoist and the champion of provincialism, as set forth in the Déracinés.

It was about 1890 that Maurice Barrès, thanks to the wisdom of a few, like M. Bourget, and thanks, above all, to the pretence and folly of a great many, took Paris by storm as the high priest of that famous Culte du Moi which I shall call in English the Cult of Ego, but which loud Worship of Self would describe much more accurately than quiet Self-culture. He had been known already for some years in the Latin Quarter, and when I say that he took Paris by storm I only mean that a few hundreds of his fellow-students trumpeted in every direction the praise given to his books by a few indulgent as well as clear-sighted critics, and copied his attitude to the amazement and admiration of their provin

cial cousins; for the volumes themselves sold slowly, and even the most successful did not go beyond a tenth edition.

Maurice Barrès in those days was ignorant, wonderfully ignorant and raw, but clever, ravenously ambitious, and he affected complete scepticism. He had read, as he said, or skipped through, as we think, too many philosophical six-shilling volumes, and in the confusion of his young brain he declared that religions, morals, and nationalities were overthrown idols. There was only one deity of the existence and omnipresence of which he entertained no doubts; that was his own clever, bubbling little self, his voracious individuality, a dainty Parisian -not Lorrain-Moloch, and he worshipped it.

He did not rise at once to the dar ing conception embodied in the more daring phrase "Cult of Ego." But he spoke immediately of withstanding the pressing universe about him, and this meant a good deal already. As to his method of resisting the universe, it was purely literary, and he will perhaps die without unlearning the habit. His life has been an endless conflict beween the yearning after action and the longing for adequate expression, which literary tendency has invariably got the better of its rival. What is the good, he thinks, of fighting the world if nobody hears of the exploit?

In our agitated but unchivalrous days all that a young man-as full of ambition and as destitute of humility as Barrès was at the time can do towards the conquest of the universe is to try and understand it, and put the result of the effort in print. So it was in fact that Sous l'Eil des Barbares came into existence. The Barbarians are the philistines who think not and write not. One ought to think and write in order to get away from the

common herd. But to understand the universe requires considerable exertion, as the disgusted reader of sixshilling volumes has already realized, and it is easier and, after all, more profitable to rest satisfied with describing it. Most Barbarians do not see the difference and buy the description as if it were an explanation.

So the first volume published by Maurice Barrès was only a literary exercise I could almost say a scholastic exercise, for we possess editions of the work in which the author has given us, with admirable simplicity, the theme of his chapters in the philistinish language side by side with their Barresian development-and it is very like the translation recommended by Dr. Johnson of a passage of Gib-· bon into English. Not SO lucid, though.

One trait of this early work reminds us of Verlaine's poetry. Whenever Barrès felt that he had something worth while to say, he wrote it, like the poet, his elder, in perfectly clear language. But the language is seldom clear, because the youthful author, being no fool, was often aware that his thoughts would look commonplace unless they were clad in a style rare enough to appear at once as the height of fashion. It requires some attention to satisfy yourself that nine-tenths of Sous l'Eil des Barbares is only habit and not substance. Suppose a very conceited, very dandified, and tolerably gifted young man walking from his club to his rooms one night in a fairly excited condition, and talking to an admiring friend on the way. His remarks would vary in tone as he and his companion would pass from the glaring boulevard to the quiet of the Tuileries and to the solemn poetry of the river, but they would still be a very young man's remarks, and if the young man were nearer a Byron than a mere pretender, when he had shaken