She would doubtless remember him to the last day she should live. He wondered if they would iron him in the presence of the ladies. Could he count upon his strong young muscles to obey his will and submit without resistance when the officers should lay their hands upon him, and thus avoid a scene?

And all at once perhaps it was the sweet look in her face that made all gentle things seem possible it occurred to him that he despaired too easily. An arrest might not be in immediate contemplation, the corpus delicti was impossible of proof. He could surely make such disposition of his own property as seemed to him fit, and the explanation that he was at odds with his friends, dead-broke, thrown out of business in the recent panic, might pass muster with the rural officer, since no crime could be discovered to fit the destruction of the clothes. Thus he might still remain unidentified with Lucien Royce, who pretended to be dead and was alive, who had had in trust a large sum of money in a belt which was found upon another man, robbed, and perhaps murdered for it. The sheriff of Kildeer County had never dreamed of the like of that, he was very sure.

The next moment his heart sank like lead, for there amongst the audience, quite distinct in the glooms, was the sharp, keen, white face of a man he had seen before, a certain noted detective. It was but once, yet, with that idea of crime rife in his mind, he placed the man instantly. He remembered a court-room in Memphis, during the trial of a certain notable case, where he had chanced to loiter in the tedium of waiting for a boat on one of his trips through the city, and he had casually watched this man as he gave his testimony. His presence here was significant, conclusive, to be interpreted far otherwise than any mission of the sheriff of the county. Royce did not for one moment doubt that it was in the interests of the marble company, the

tenants of the estate per autre vie, although the criminal charge might emanate directly from the firm whose funds had so mysteriously disappeared from his keeping, whose trust must now seem so basely betrayed. There was no possible escape; the stanch walls of the building were unbroken even by a window, and the only exit from behind the partition was through the stage itself in full view of the watchful eyes of the officers. Any effort, any action, would merely accelerate the climax, precipitate the shame of the arrest he dreaded, — and in her presence! He felt how hard the heart of the cestui que vie was thumping at the prospect of the summary resuscitation. He said to himself, with his ironical habit of mind, that he had found dying a far easier matter. But there was no responsive satire in the hunted look of his hot, wild, glancing eyes, the quiver of every muscle, the cold thrills that successively trembled through the nervous fibres. He looked so unlike himself for the moment, as he turned with a violent start on feeling the touch of a hand on his arm, that Seymour paused with some deprecation and uncertainty. Then with a renewed intention the manager said persuasively, "You won't mind doing it over again, will you? You see they won't be content without it."

-

A certain element of surprise was blended with the manager's cogitations which he remembered afterward rather than realized at the moment. It had to do with the altered aspect of the man, a sudden grave tumultuous excitement which his manner and glance bespoke; but the perception of this was subacute in Seymour's mind and subordinate to the awkward dilemma in which he found himself as manager of the little enterprise. There was not time, in justice to the rest of the programme, to repeat the basket trick, and had the farce been the work of another he would have rung the curtain up forthwith on its first scene. But the pride and sensitiveness of the

author alike forbade the urging of his own work upon the attention of an audience still clamorously insistent upon the repetition of another attraction, and hardly likely, if balked of this, to be fully receptive to the real merits of the little play.

Seymour remembered afterward, but did not note at the time, the obvious effort with which the juggler controlled his agitation. "Oh, anything goes!" he assented, and in a moment more the curtain had glided up with less than its usual convulsive resistance. They were standing again together with composed aspect in the brilliance of the footlights, and Seymour, with a change of phrase and an elaboration of the idea, was dilating afresh upon the essential values of the positive in life; the possible pernicious effects of any delusion of the senses; the futility of finding pleasure in the false, simply because of the flagrancy of its falsity; the deleterious moral effects of such exhibitions upon the very young, teaching them to love the acrobatic lie instead of the lame truth, from all of which he deduced the propriety of tying the juggler up for the rest of the evening. But the bullet-heads were not as dense as they looked. They learned well when they learned at all, and the pauses of this rodomontade were filled with callow chuckles and shrill whinnies of appreciative delight, anticipative of the wonder to come. They now viewed with eager forwarding interest the juggler's bonds, little dreaming what grim prophecy he felt in their restraint, and the smallest boy of the lot shrilly sang out, when all was done, "Give him another turn of the rope! Seymour, his blond face flushed by the heat and his exertions to the hue of his pink-and-white blazer, ostentatiously wrought another knot, and down the juggler went on the floor, encased in the unbroken netting; the cloth was thrown over the man and the basket, and Seymour turned anew to the audience and

took up the thread of his discourse. It came as trippingly off his tongue as before, and in the dusky gray-purple haze, the seeming medium in which the audience sat, fair, smiling faces, full of expectation and attention, looked forth their approval, and now and again broke into laughter. When, having concluded by announcing that he intended to convey the discomfited juggler off the stage, he found naught under the cloth but the empty net without a mesh awry, the man having escaped, his rage was a trifle more pronounced than before. With a wild gesture he tossed the fabric out to the audience to bid them observe how the villain had outwitted him, and then sprang into the basket and stamped tumultuously all around in the interior, evidently covering every square inch of its surface, while the detective's keen eyes watched with an eager intensity, as if the only thought in his mind were the miracle of the juggler's withdrawal. Out Seymour plunged finally, and with dogged resolution he put the lid on and began to cord up the basket as if for departure.

He

in which he found himself placed. had barely turned his back for a moment, when this juggler whom he had taken so much pains to secure, in order to protect the kind and considerate audience from further deceits of a treacherous art, mysteriously disappeared, and whither he was sure he could not imagine. He hesitated for a moment and looked a trifle embarrassed, for this was the point at which the basket should begin to roll along the floor. He gave it a covert glance, but it was motionless where he had left it. Raising his voice, he repeated the words as with indignant emphasis, thinking the juggler had not caught the cue. He went on speaking at random, but his words came less freely; the audience was silent, expectant; the basket still lay motionless on the floor. Seeing that he must needs force the crisis, he turned, exclaiming with uplifted hands, "Do my eyes deceive me, or is that basket stirring, rolling on the floor?"

"Are you hurt? he gasped in a tremulous voice to the silence beneath the lid, and as he tossed it aside he recoiled abruptly, rising to his feet with a loud and poignant cry, "Oh, my God! he is dead! he is dead!"

The sudden transition from the purely festival character of the atmosphere to the purlieus of grim tragedy told heavily on every nerve. There was one null moment blank of comprehension, and then women were screaming, and more than one fainted; the clamor of overturned benches added to the confu

sion, as the men, with grim set faces and startled eyes, pressed forward to the stage; the children cowered in ghastly affright close below the footlights, except one small creature who thought it a part of the fun, not dreaming what death. might be, and was laughing aloud in high-keyed mirth down in the dusky gloom. A physician among the summer sojourners, on a flying visit for a breath of mountain air, was the first man to reach the stage, and, with the terrorstricken Seymour, drew the long lithe body out and straightened it on the floor, as the curtain was lowered to hide a mise en scène which it might be terror to women and children to remember. His ready hand desisted after a glance. The man had died from the first stroke of the bowie-knife, penetrating his side, and doubtless lacerating the outer tissues of the heart. The other strokes were registered, the one on his hand, the other, a slight graze, on the neck. A tiny package had fallen on the floor as the hasty hands had torn the shirt aside from the wound: the deft professional fingers unfolded it, a bit of faded flower, a wild purple verbena; the physician looked at it for a moment, and tossed it aside in the blood on the floor, uninterested. The pericardium was more in his line. He was realizing, too, that he could not start to-morrow, as he had intended, for his office and his rounds among his patients. The coroner's jury was an obstinate impediment, and his would be expert testimony.

Upon this inquest, held incongruously enough in the ballroom, the facts of the information which Owen Haines had brought to the juggler and the presence of the officers in the audience were elicited, and added to the excitements incident to the event. The friends of young Seymour, who was overwhelmed by the tragedy, believed and contended that since escape from prosecution for some crime was evidently impossible, the juggler had in effect committed suicide by

holding up his left arm that the knife might pierce a vital part. Thus they sought to avert the sense of responsibility which a man must needs feel for so terrible an accident wrought by his own hand. But crime as a factor seemed doubtful. The sheriff, indeed, upon the representations of Sims, supplemented by the mystery of the lime-kiln which Knowles had disclosed, had induced the detective to accompany him to the mountains to seek to identify the stranger as a defaulting cashier from one of the cities for whose apprehension a goodly amount of money would be paid. But in no respect did Royce correspond to the perpetrator of any crime upon the detective's list.

"He need n't have been afraid of me," he observed dryly; "I saw in a minute he was n't our fellow. And I was just enjoying myself mightily."

He ac

The development of the fact of the presence of the officers and the juggler's knowledge that they were in the audience affected the physician's testimony and his view of the occurrence. counted it an accident. The nerve of the young man, shaken by the natural anxiety at finding himself liable to immediate arrest, was not sufficient to carry him through the feat. He failed to shift position with the celerity essential to the basket trick, and the uplifted position of the arm, which left the body unprotected to receive the blow, was but the first effort to compass the swift movements ne

cessary to the feat. The unlucky young manager was exonerated from all blame in the matter, but the verdict was death by accident.

Nevertheless, for many a day and all the years since the argument continues. Along the verge of those crags overlooking the valley, in the glamours of a dreamy golden haze, with the amethystine mountains on the horizon reflecting the splendors of the sunset sky, and with the rich content of the summer solstice in the perfumed air; or amongst the fronds of the ferns about the fractured cliffs whence the spring wells up with a tinkling tremor and exhilarant freshness and a cool, cool splashing as of the veritable fountain of youth; or in the shadowy twilight of the long, low building where the balls go crashing down the alleys; or sometimes even in the ballroom in pauses of the dance when the music is but a plaint, half-joy, halfpain, and the wind is singing a wild and mystic refrain, and the moonlight comes in at the windows and lies in great bluewhite silver rhomboids on the floor de-` spite the dull yellow glow of the lamps,

THERE comes a period when the work and character of a great man can be fairly summed up for all time by the biographer; when the judgment is as nearly in focus as ever the fallible human judgment can be; when the distortion of passions and the multiplicity of details inseparable from nearness of view, and the obscuring, sometimes magnifying effects of distance are both at a minimum. Certainly that time had not come for Nelson when Charnock and Barker, or even Southey, wrote the life of the great admiral. But the right man does not always come at the right time, and the world's general estimate of its illustrious men not infrequently remains without any adequate concrete expression.

Individual judgments are necessarily fallible and incomplete. They are either strong and masterful, tainted by prejudices and warped by that constitutional way of looking at things which we call the personal equation, or weak and colorless, the loose gathering up of that crude public opinion which surrounds a great name as the photosphere surrounds the sun. Still, the general consensus of opinion of great men, as of great books, is not far out of the way. The critical acumen of the scholar, the professional knowledge of the expert, the feeling, taste, and judgment of the few, and the shrewd common sense of the many, something of all these is found in the popular verdict; and this composite picture, as it were, derived from so many sources, is usually not far from right. But just because, though so well defined, it is so composite, the biographer who can intelligently represent it is rare. “A true delineation of the smallest man," says Carlyle, "is capable of interesting

1 The Life of Nelson, the Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain. By ALFRED

the greatest man." What an interest a man would have for us if we knew that he was thus to sum up for posterity our life - work! We should ask, not only, What access has he to the record? but also, What professional capacity, what temper of mind, what human experience of life, will he bring to the analysis of our motives, the judgment of our acts, the weighing of our character?

But

We had the right to expect much from Captain Mahan, especially that he would give us a critical estimate of Nelson's genius from the point of view of the naval expert, and that he would show us the relations of Nelson's naval operations to the general course of contemporary events in that same original way in which he had already made real for us, to a degree no previous writer had done, the influence of sea power upon history. he has done very much more than this. He has made the man Nelson live to us as he has never lived before.1 Nelson we knew already as a born fighter, heroic, vain, affectionate, sensitive, nervous, yet as a name rather than a man, - -a name symbolizing certain brilliant achievements, but a man only as he emerged from the obscurity which belongs to the sea, when the flash-light of glory was turned upon him. We know him now a man among men, a real human person. ality, in a sense in which we have never known him before.

It is not so easy to make the great admiral thus real to us as it is the great general. We know Grant better than we know Farragut, as we know Wellington, Marlborough, and Ney better than Tromp, Rodney, or St. Vincent. The sailor lives apart, in a round of professional duties which lie beyond the range of our observation. Aside from the inTHAYER MAHAN. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1897.