give me views toward the four winds, its roof a view which has for bounds the horizon, and I shall watch both dawn and evening. I shall have the Isun all day when he shines, and live lifted up in a place where the prospect is as fine before as behind. And I shall have a pleasant, selfish, rather sanctimonious feeling of guardianship and protection. A man could almost fancy himself a tutelary deity did he live on a tower and watch day by day the awakening of a little city, have his ear taken by the first shrill cockcrow, see the blue spirals of household smoke unroll, hear all day the hum of the city's labor and the voices of its children at play float up to him on his airy height, and watch the ruddy eyes of lighted windows grow blank one by one after curfew. I shall not think much in my tower, or produce anything, or be a better man, but I shall have my solitude, dream much, and gain an increasing tolerance. The growth of tolerance is one of the certain signs that a man grows old, for youth, which is certain of itself and of the universe and of the ways of men, is fiercely intolerant. My tower, too, is to be a testing-place for my friends. A love of cheap romance may bring them to me once or twice, but my stairs and my draughts and my cramped quarters will winnow them, and I shall be left with the tried and the trusty. And we will never talk of the army.

I have twice been the accidental guest of men who lived in towers in cities, and I found them ordinary companionable humans. I cannot believe that their dwellings thrilled them with any sense of the romantic. Life was a hard thing for them, a business of scraping and contriving, stale crusts and thin wine, and bitter winter cold. At Segovia, that dead, proud city of Spain, where one sees the cloaked

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serenos, carrying horn lanterns and staves, set out on their rounds at night, and wakes to hear them proclaim the hour and the state of the weather, I found a whole family lodged in the cathedral tower. cathedral tower. All one morning I sat high up there, in a gusty embrasure of the bell-chamber, the great clangorous bells half seen in the darkness above and breaking at noon into a tumult of bronze. For Segovia lies on its hill as on a catafalque, and the bells ring a perpetual requiem. There was little to do that morning but sit in the tower and talk execrable Spanish to the guardian of the tower, who pointed out invisible things round about. It rained as it will rain sometimes in Spain, and the fine, continuous rods of water were so thick and so serried that they wove a gray veil which blotted out the woods of La Granja and made the Guadaramma a shadow on a guessed-at horizon. About noon the man took me into an inner room, a cavernous place hewn in the heart of the tower, where his wife was cooking mysterious things over a brazier. Even the sound of the bells was muffled here, and the bronze might have been sounding in heaven. I accepted the guardian's twice-repeated invitation, and shared with him, his wife, and a troop of shy, bright-eyed children their soup, their sour bread, their pipkin of stew, and their harsh wine. The host did the honors of his house with a grave Castilian dignity. I should have liked to get at his philosophy of life, which was probably that of a decent, honorable poverty. And I remember how in the afternoon the clouds were miraculously rolled away, and the mountains leaped forward- there is no other word and stood at the gates of the city. In the washed crystalline air every detail of the rock stood engraved with incomparable fineness and precision; the lingering

snowdrifts were dazzling in the gullies, and all the face of the mountains was laced with the silver of cataracts which seemed so near that one strained to hear their rejoicing shout. And I wondered whether the old Churchmen, deans and canons, de esta santa yglesia, who lie buried before the west door, ever climbed the tower to lift up their eyes to the hills, or whether the beat of the bells was for them only the call to an irksome round of office.

Another friend of an afternoon was a cobbler who slept and had his bench in a little room under the leads of the tower of St. Martin at Ypres. He, too, was a keeper of the tower, and he left his hammering to point out this and that thing of beauty beneath me. The little, lovely city slept in the

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gold-flecked haze of an amethystine September afternoon. A beneficent, constant peace was spread with the autumn sunlight on the stepped gables, on the bricks of the houses, golden and pale rose and lilac with the patina of age, on the noble mass of the Cloth Hall, and the tall slate roofs, grown silvery as lavender, of the dim, forsaken cloister of the Poor Clares. The cobbler named this and that spire in the circle of the rich, crowded Flemish country, and this and that low hill or ridge which then had no name except for those who lived beside it. No man will ever look upon that beauty again; the memory of it grows dusty in those of us who carry it in the chambers of our brains, and the shadow of it will go from the earth when we die.

FOR the first time in his life, Mr. Figg-Smith stood in the smoking room of the Marlborough Club. In an adjoining room sat the St. James's Committee of the Workers' and Soldiers' Council. Faintly along Pall Mall from Trafalgar Square, came the regular report of the shooting party. Below the window rolled the motor tumbrils. Mr. Figg-Smith regarded his companions. There were four of these, and brief though was to be his contact with them, Mr. Figg-Smith thrilled a little to find himself among them. Lord Culver, the Honorable Ambrose Parting, the Reverend Sir James

Newbiggin-Newbiggin, the party was completed, and, for Mr. Figg-Smith, crowned by the presence in it of Mr. Belton. None of the four men, however, was at all communicative; all appeared thoughtful and introspective; and Mr. Figg-Smith had leisure to reflect upon the strange turn of Fate that had brought him there.

Born some forty-eight years before, Mr. Figg-Smith had been designed on imposing lines, and, in spite of recent privations, was still inclined to embonpoint. The son of a successful draper in South London, he himself had become the chief director of the limited

company that, on his father's death, had taken charge of the business. Expensively educated, however, Mr. Figg-Smith had failed to find in commerce a full satisfaction. Conscious of social gifts of no mean order, the possessor of a retentive memory, ready with information, the reverse of shy, and a keen student of books of reference, Mr. Figg-Smith had perceived in society the ideal theatre of his activities. He had impressed this on his wife, even before their marriage; she had been the daughter of a suburban rector. 'We must have the best,' he had said; 'nothing but the best.' Leaving Clapham, where her brother was still a dentist, they had moved to Wimbledon, where one of their friends had been a colonel; and it was with the latter that Mr. Figg-Smith had twice dined in London at the United Services Club.

He had then been thirty-two, with a somewhat full habit, a large and wellformed nose, and a singularly clear and penetrating voice, quickly discernible over intervening conversations. Not being an army man, he was, of course, ineligible for membership of this particular club. But it had been disadvantageous to him, as he had at once felt, to find himself unable to return the colonel's hospitality. Unfortunately, the colonel, being a poor man (he had, in fact, borrowed money from Mr. Figg-Smith), belonged to no other club, and was unable to help him; and letters of inquiry to the secretaries of Brooks's and the Carlton had brought him unsatisfactory replies. The vicar of the parish, however, an ardent Conservative, had succeeded in getting him elected to the Constitutional 'very mixed, I'm afraid, but still a pied-a-terre; and of course, Belton's a member, and fellows like that.'

Here, for a couple of years, he had spent most of his time; here he had

begun to write letters to the daily press; but here also he had first become conscious of the jealousy provoked by an able man. This was, of course, due, as he had explained to his wife, to a lack of breeding in most of his fellow members. 'I shall look out for another club,' he had told her; and, as a preparatory measure, he had moved to Hans Crescent. Here he had increased his expenditure, and, after some effort, had been accepted as a candidate for a Midland constituency; and this had brought him into sufficient prominence as to have admitted him to a reference book, widely known as Who's Who. In this, for the first time, he had been able to describe himself to the reading public as the greatgreat-great-grandson of Sir Reginald Polecatte, an eminent ancestor of his mother, the late Miss Figg, of Camberwell. On the other hand, as a political speaker, he had early discovered himself quite unsuited to prevalent campaigning methods. To bandy words with hecklers, usually ignorant and plebeian, had seemed to him inconsistent with dignity; and he had, therefore, withdrawn, not without a certain bitterness, from electioneering circles. He had then bought a house, with several acres of ground, in a rural part of Hampshire, and had submitted his name and genealogy for insertion in Kelly's Handbook of Landed Gentry. By an unfortunate oversight, he had not yet been included in this, and, by an equally unhappy mischance, he had found himself among neighbors of the most prejudiced, envious, and unresponsive nature. He had, however, obtained permission to use a coat-of-arms, containing a reminiscence of the late Sir Reginald Polecatte's; and he had dispensed hospitality to the Member of Parliament representing his division of Hampshire. His name had also been submitted for

election to several clubs, more exclusive than the Constitutional; and, but for the long waiting lists, he would no doubt have been elected to them before the present catastrophe had placed him where he was. From his fellow aristocrats recognition had been slow. But now, before the judgment seat of the people, he had been included among them at last at any rate, for the purpose of investigation.

It was a strange experience. It was a very searching one. He heard that faint report again from Trafalgar Square. A bell in the next room rang, and the door was opened. An usher looked into the smoking-room, and summoned Lord Culver. A bow-legged and rubicund nobleman rose with extreme reluctance from his seat. Mr. FiggSmith heard the voice of the chairman.

'It's damned 'ot,' it said. 'Leave that door open.'

By approaching a little nearer, Mr. Figg-Smith had the opportunity, therefore, of hearing an aristocrat meeting his doom.

'You're a lord?'

'Bless you, I could n't help it.' The counsel, appointed for the defense, remarked that Lord Culver had been born one.

'No excuse,' said the Chairman. "That's been ruled out."

There was a chorus of 'Hear, 'ears.' 'What have you got to say for yourself that you should n't be shot dead?' 'Well, now, look here, you fellers,' said Lord Culver, 'I may be a lord but I never asked to be one. I wish to God I had never been. Twenty bob a week an' a quiet life that's my mark. It always has been. And I've always been a sportsman, as you know. Why, there's Joe Willocks, who used to ride for me.'

"That's so,' said a raucous voice. "E was always a sport, genl'men; I can't deny it.'

'And I would like to point out,' said counsel, 'that we're down to the last five; and that there's a growing sentiment in favor of mercy.'

'Don't you fellers forget, too,' put in Lord Culver, that my old grandfather was a butcher.'

'Retail or wholesale?' inquired the Chairman.

'I don't quite understand,' replied Lord Culver.

'Did he serve behind the counter?' 'Oh, God bless you, yes in his earlier days, you know - damned old thief.'

'Are you a democrat?'

'You bet your boots I am. No more lordships again for me, old cock.' There was a ripple of laughter and some low conversation. 'Recommended to live,' said the Chairman. 'Next.'

The usher reappeared.

"The Reverend Sir James NewbigginNewbiggin.'

A hatchet-faced clergyman, who had been biting his nails in a corner, rose and entered the chamber of judgment. 'You're the fifth baronet?'

'Yes, that's so. But I was also a Labor candidate for South Bucks.' "That's quite true,' said the counsel for the defense.

'And I had to refund my deposit money.'

'We don't like priests,' said the Chairman. 'I'm now an agnostic.' 'You have no property, I think?' said the counsel for the defense. 'Not a penny - only this wretched title. It's handicapped me all my life.' 'What do you say, gentlemen?' inquired the Chairman. 'Oh, let him go.' 'Very well; next.'

"The Honorable Ambrose Parting,' cried the usher. A tall young man rose from the settee, disarranged his tie, and followed the usher.