pheasants. Mr. Warton, it appeared, had accepted a seat on the car, which made necessary a shifting of the hamper, and as Charlie unfastened Joe Brierley's knots, the dreaded questioning began. 'What,' said the master, 'has become of Andy Clery?'

This, indeed, was readily answered: If you plase, your honour, he's that stiff to-day wid his rheumatics he couldn't stir hand or fut.'

'Then why didn't Pat Hearn drive?'

Here was no difficulty either. 'If you plase, your honour, he was buryin' his mother's brother over away at Ballyskreen this mornin.'

'Well now, Charlie, how about those pheasants? Can you tell Mr. Warton where he should be looking for them?'

Just then Charlie was gathering the hamper in his arms to lift it from the car-seat, and he replied with a despondent gasp: 'I cannot, your honour. Bedad, now, I could tell you as much or as little, if it was packed up inside of that I was, along wid th'ould bottles, ever since your honours quit,' he added, setting it down heavily on the gravel.

Mr. Warton stooped over it to read the address, which was written on a page of an old account-book, and tied on with a leather bootlace. 'Bottles ?' he said immediately. Why, what's this?' And he twitched out a little russet-barred feather, which showed its tip through the wickerwork.

He answered himself promptly by cutting the string and throwing back the lid, which disclosed to view nothing less than three brace of fine pheasants in their gay brown plumage. The hamper, in fact, was filled with them, save a few empty bottles inserted for the purpose of jingling plausibly. Scarcely could Charlie believe his eyes, and amazedly they widened in his sharp-chinned sunburnt face, beneath the shadowy shock of black hair feebly repressed by a small cloth cap. But while he stood dumfoundered, he was nearly upset by a thump on the back. 'Well done, yourself,' said the master. You made a good haul when you were about it. From Joe Brierley, you say? They're not the people I'd have suspected; but one never knows where one is with anybody, and that's a fact. I didn't overstate his capabilities, Jerry, you see. "Packed up inside along with the bottles "-the young

rascal.'

By

'Couldn't have made a neater job of it,' said his cousin. Jove, Eddy, I'll tell you what, you ought to put him into the con

stabulary. Evidently that's what he's cut out for, if he has another inch or so to grow. I can give you a recommendation to Colonel Perry, any day. He'd be invaluable in the detective department.' Exactly my idea,' said Mr. Blake. 'How'd you like the notion of being a police sergeant, Charlie ?'

To these, and to other praises and prophecies, Charlie listened with bewildered dismay. He still retained enough of his original sentiments towards the police to make him feel much as a hare might have done at the proposal that it should occupy a prominent post in connection with a pack of hounds. The threat of such a reward urged him to explain how quite accidentally he had come by the hamper; yet it was difficult to disclaim all the merit so enthusiastically ascribed to him. In reply to inquiries respecting his stratagems, he could only stammer: 'I-I just walked about, sir'; whereupon he was assured that he had done it to some purpose, and might look forward to being a County Inspector one of these days. With that fearful promotion looming before him he started on his drive homeward. It contrasted and corresponded in several points with his first journey along that road nearly a dozen years ago. Then, he had sat huddled under the darkness of a winter evening, dreading, in a childish panic, that the police barracks were his destination. Now, as he jogged towards the September sunset, he was scared, hardly less childishly, by the same fate from a different aspect. Then he had just commenced as a successful pickpocket, a career nipped in the very bud. Now he was considered to have taken most brilliantly his first step in a totally distinct and yet allied calling.

As they approached the Brierleys' boreen, down which he was directed to turn, for the purpose of bringing home to the criminals their evil deeds, he said to himself, with a sinking heart: 'It's ragin' they'll all be, and thinkin' me the worst in the world. I'd no hand or part in it, anyway. I wisht to goodness I'd niver took the ould gentleman's purse. Bedad, I wisht everybody 'ud lave meddlin' wid other people's things alone.' An aspiration which, though not based upon the loftiest principles, is yet so highly moral that it suggests a fitting conclusion for this chapter from Charlie Millen's history.

JANE BARLOW.

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES.

BY ANDREW LANG.

XI. SAINT-GERMAIN THE DEATHLESS.

AMONG the best brief masterpieces of fiction are Lytton's 'The Haunters and the Haunted,' and Thackeray's Notch on the Axe' in 'Roundabout Papers.' Both deal with a mysterious being who passes through the ages, rich, powerful, always behind the scenes, coming no man knows whence, and dying, or pretending to die, obscurely-you never find authentic evidence of his decease. In other later times, at other courts, such an one reappears, and runs the same course of luxury, marvel, and hidden potency.

Lytton returned to and elaborated his idea in the Margrave of 'A Strange Story,' who has no 'soul,' and prolongs his physical and intellectual life by means of an elixir. Margrave is not bad, but he is inferior to the hero, less elaborately designed, of 'The Haunters and the Haunted.' Thackeray's tale is written in a tone of mock mysticism, but he owns that he likes his own story, in which the strange hero, through all his many lives or reappearances, and through all the countless loves on which he fatuously plumes himself, retains a slight German-Jewish accent.

It appears to me that the historic original of these romantic characters is no other than the mysterious Comte de Saint-Germain -not, of course, the contemporary and normal French soldier and minister of 1707-1778, who bore the same name. I have found the name, with dim allusions, in the unpublished letters and MSS. of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, and have not always been certain whether the reference was to the man of action or to the man of mystery. On the secret of the latter, the deathless one, I have no new light to throw, and only speak of him for a single reason. Aristotle assures us, in his 'Poetics,' that the best known myths dramatised on the Athenian stage were known to very few of the Athenian audience. It is not impossible that the story of SaintGermain, though it seems as familiar as the myth of Edipus or Thyestes, may, after all, not be vividly present to the memory of every reader. The omniscient Larousse, of the 'Dictionnaire

Universel,' certainly did not know one very accessible fact about Saint-Germain, nor have I seen it mentioned in other versions of his legend. We read, in Larousse, 'Saint-Germain is not heard of in France before 1750, when he established himself in Paris. No adventure had called attention to his existence; it was only known that he had moved about Europe, lived in Italy, Holland, and in England, and had borne the names of Marquis de Montferrat and of Comte de Bellamye, which he used at Venice.'

Lascelles Wraxall, again, in 'Remarkable Adventures' (1863), says: Whatever truth there may be in Saint-Germain's travels in England and the East Indies, it is indubitable that, from 1745 to 1755, he was a man of high position in Vienna,' while in Paris he does not appear, according to Wraxall, till 1757, having been brought from Germany by the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, whose old boots,' says Macallester the spy, Prince Charles freely damned, because they were always stuffed with projects.' Now we hear of SaintGermain, by that name, as resident, not in Vienna, but in London, at the very moment when Prince Charles, evading Cumberland, who lay with his army at Stone, in Staffordshire, marched to Derby. Horace Walpole writes to Mann in Florence (December 9, 1745):

We begin to take up people . . . the other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of Count Saint-Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is, or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings, plays on the violin wonderfully, composes, is mad, and not very sensible. He is called an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole; a somebody that married a great fortune in Mexico, and ran away with her jewels to Constantinople; a priest, a fiddler, a vast nobleman. The Prince of Wales has had unsatiated 'curiosity about him, but in vain. However, nothing has been made out against him; he is released, and, what convinces me he is not a gentleman, stays here, and talks of his being taken up for a spy.

Here is our earliest authentic note on Saint-Germain: a note omitted by his French students. He was in London from 1743 to 1745, under a name not his own, but that which he later bore at the Court of France. From the allusion to his jewels (those of a deserted Mexican bride ?), it appears that he was already as rich in these treasures as he was afterwards, when his French acquaintances marvelled at them. As to his being 'mad,' Walpole may refer to Saint-Germain's way of talking as if he had lived in remote ages, and known famous people of the past.

Having caught this daylight glimpse of Saint-Germain in Walpole, having learned that in December 1745 he was arrested and examined as a possible Jacobite agent, we naturally expect

to find contemporary official documents about his examination by the Government. Scores of such records exist, containing the questions put to, and the answers given by, suspected persons. But we vainly hunt through the Newcastle MSS. and the State Papers, Domestic, in the Record Office, for a trace of the examination of Saint-Germain. I am not aware that he has anywhere left his trail in official documents; he lives in more or less legendary memoirs, alone.

At what precise date Saint-Germain became an intimate of Louis XV., the Duc de Choiseul, Madame de Pompadour, and the Maréchal de Belle-Isle, one cannot ascertain. The writers of memoirs are the vaguest of mortals about dates; one only discerns that Saint-Germain was much about the French Court, and high in the favour of the King, having rooms at Chambord, during, and shortly after, the Seven Years' War, and at the time of the peace negotiations of 1762-1763. The art of compiling false or forged memoirs of that period was widely practised; but the memoirs of Madame du Hausset, who speaks of Saint-Germain, are authentic She was the widow of a poor man of noble family, and was one of two femmes de chambre of Madame de Pompadour. Her manuscript was written, she explains, by aid of a brief diary which she kept during her term of service. One day M. Senac de Meilhan found Madame de Pompadour's brother, M. de Marigny, about to burn a packet of papers. It is the journal,' he said, ‘of a femme de chambre of my sister, a good kind of woman.' De Meilhan asked for the manuscript, which he later gave to Mr. Crawford, one of the Kilwinning family, in Ayrshire, who later helped in the escape of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette to Varennes, where they were captured. With the journal of Madame du Hausset were several letters to Marigny on points of historical anecdote.1

Crawford published the manuscript of Madame du Hausset, which he was given by De Meilhan, and the memoirs are thus from an authentic source. The author says that Louis XV. was always

'One of these gives Madame de Vieux-Maison as the author of a reman à clef, Secret Memoirs of the Court of Persia, which contains an early reference to the Man in the Iron Mask (died 1703). The letter-writer avers that D'Argenson, the famous minister of Louis XV., said that the Man in the Iron Mask was really a person fort peu de chose, 'of very little account,' and that the Regent d'Orléans was of the same opinion. This corroborates my theory, that the Mask was merely the valet of a Huguenot conspirator, Roux de Marsilly, captured in England, and imprisoned because he was supposed to know some terrible secret—which he knew nothing about. See The Valet's Tragedy, Longmans, 1903.