the flowers, "but dear old Martha has bcen here before us both. She has visited the tomb of her beloved 'very early in the morning.' Come back to the summer house, Raeburn, and I will tell you the story.

"I hardly know where to start, or why I feel called upon to tell you of this tragedy," Trevor began, "except that there is a curious weaving of this date into my uncle's life. Sixty years ago to-day he was born; thirty years ago his wife-met her death, and on July 12th, 1903 he lies dying. And she who passed away at that middle milestone sought her own death-and found it in the little lake before us. Her body lies within a stone's throw of where it was recovered. It is not for me to judge that old man; and yet a word from him would have averted the catastrophe."

Trevor arose and paced the little platform several times before he resumed. "I have told you that my uncle frequently visited this place before he married. There were bad men and worse women for his neighbours, whose influence harmed him in many ways. Doubtless it was a mistake to bring his young wife here, and my grandfather must have realised the fact, for he came up to visit the young people before they had been here a month. Ten years older than his young wife, the gay young captain of artillery had by no means finished sowing his wild oats, and my grandfather's whole heart was set upon the idea that marriage would work a reform. My aunt had been grandfather's ward; the orphan child of old army friends-we Trevors have all been army people until my generationand she was brought up in our old home. That, therefore, the marriage had for years been an event fixed will not surprise you, and I grieve to say that while. uncle had long been the girlish ideal of my Aunt Miriam, there was more tolerance than love on the other side.

"Poor young thing, she was neglected. before my grandfather came here, and after that; for, though his servants unostentatiously watched the doors, he still slipped out nightly to join his carousing friends. The windows of his roomyour room last night, where her picture still hangs were secretly opened to let him ride away"

"The windows in my room?" exclaimed Raeburn.

"Yes; I will soon explain. Many a night the young wife locked the casement behind him as he rode off on his horse, and softly admitted him again in the early hours. We know that she begged -entreated him to give up his evil associates, and yet she shielded him for very pride's sake until after grandfather had gone back to New York.

"Then came the serpent-though this was scarcely an Eden-in the guise of one of uncle's friends. The man lived near, and became a daily visitor. He made much of her neglected condition. Finally, one afternoon, he persuaded her that a party of young people, mutual friends, were to meet at a town some ten miles away. Martha heard a portion of their conversation, and has always maintained that my aunt was given to understand that she would later meet my uncle, and be brought home by him that night.

For a wonder uncle came home early that evening, and of course there was a terrible scene. Martha stoutly defended her mistress's motives, but uncle raged like a wild man. Later it came on to storm in a frightful fashion, and it must have been near midnight when she came alone and on foot to uncle's window and tapped for admission-but no answer came. Doubtless she felt that she must see him, and no other, before she would dare to enter the place. Then, heartsick, frantic, wearied in flesh and spirit, believing that she could never convince her husband of her innocence, she turned her tired feet down the hillside to the lakeand ended it all."

Trevor paused and looked toward the softly lapping waves, while Raeburn felt within him a strange sympathy for this broken-winged butterfly of a bygone day, and there was a lump in his throat as he pictured the laughing face, whose image he had studied on the previous night, lying cold in such a bitter death.

"In the morning," said Trevor, “uncle came from his room early, a picture of misery and remorse, and shortly afterward one of the work-people found the body. Her silken shoes were stained and torn with running along the road, so we know that she must have fled from the tempter when she found, too late, that she had been lured away by lies.

Hard-hard it must have been to fight her way homeward in that blinding storm only to find her husband's heart locked against her.

"Of course all this came out at the inquest; it will come out anew when he is laid away, and I am telling you the story that my best friend may better understand the man who has shown me such love as few fathers bestow. Perhaps, behind a shield of cold, hard pride, few men have suffered more.

"Granted that the wrong was monstrous-I know, as perhaps none other knows, the pitiless meed of its atone

ment.

"That is all, I think-no, your windows. I am told that my uncle kept that apartment for a time after the tragedy. That those about him felt that he occupied rather than slept in it; for each morning he emerged more worn and broken, as though every night added a score to his years. Finally, he gave orders-we never knew why-that those two windows should be bricked up. He saw the masons begin; then left Highmere for ten years, and his evil ways forever."

"Why," inquired Raeburn, after a pause, "did you wish me placed somewhere else?"

"I can give you no reason, except that all my life I have had a horror of the very room itself. My uncle never entered it during our rare visits here, and so I grew up with an aversion to the place. Do you wish to change?"

"Oh, no,' was the reply; "I am very

comfortable."

There was no perceptible alteration in Major Trevor's condition during the day. Raeburn wandered about the place, ending the morning in the library. He found that nearly all the books in that large room bore directly upon the art of war or the lives of the world's famous captains. One little book upon the life of Sir Charles Napier appealed to him in a whimsical fashion, when he recalled his thoughts of the night before upon the large noses of some great fighters. Taking up the book, it opened at a place where a newspaper clipping had been inserted. This was an excerpt from an old copy of the London Times, and contained an appreciation of Sir Charles's life. Raeburn's eye caught its keynote in the

following lines: "High spirits, immense courage, great ingenuity, and prodigious egotism."

Here Trevor found him, and picking up a bound volume of the Army Register said, "I do not know that the stars fight for or against us, but I believe that there are climacterics to which heaven and hell lend their powers. My uncle won three brevets by personal valor

"Yes," interrupted Raeburn. "I have read the record."

"But they do not show one important point. Listen: Battery Wagner, July 12th, 1863; July 12th, 1864, he rendered the particular services for which he was. brevetted a captain. July 12th, 1877, was the date of the battle at the Clearwater. There he received the wound that placed him on the retired list, and there he won our army's glorious guerdon, the Congressional Medal of Honour."

Rapidly turning the pages he found the record of men who wear that decoration, and read, with glistening eyes:

"Major James Barfield Trevor: For most distinguished gallantry in action at the Clearwater, Idaho, where he voluntarily and successfully conducted, in the face of a withering fire, a party which recovered possession of an abandoned howitzer and two Gatling guns, lying between the lines and within a few yards of the Indians."

"I feel I know-he hoped for death that day with honour. But Fate said: "No; not now. Suffer yet many years." Turning to Raeburn he held out his hand and said, in a choking voice, “Come and see him."

Raeburn softly followed to the room from whence the master of Highmere was slowly drifting to meet the Great Mystery. He saw a face which seemed to bear little more than a family resemblance to the portrait, save in the hawk's bill nose. For the rest, the jaws seemed more square, the black hair had turned a frosty iron grey, and though he could not see the eyes, he did not need their evidence to tell him that firmness was the chief characteristic of that weatherbeaten, martial countenance. As he gazed he wondered in how great degree that tragedy of thirty years ago was responsible for the presence at Highmere

There is great excitement in Iceland at this moment. Hall Caine is on his way there equipped with a large novelproducing plant, including cameras, sheep shears, filing cabinets, blank forms of affidavit, a hectograph, ten stenographers, and a barrel of ink. He will learn the language on shipboard so that no time may be lost. The matter is urgent, for punctually on the morning of Aug. 1, 1904, there is due from him a novel of great primitive passions, strong, deep, fresh and true, of which the scene must be laid in Iceland. It will be written with terrific force throughout, and with abundant evidence of first-hand impressions. Types studied on the spot, actual events in the life of the people, their very words, a background of ice, snow, Arctic twilight, penguins and walruses, a foreground of fierce primitive hate and equally fierce joy, all to be first seen, then snap-shotted, then dictated, then carefully revised, read back, punctuated, and filed -it will be a busy and a fruitful fortnight. But he will not fail. The elements will be there as per invoice on the morning of Aug. 1. "What will your next novel be? Religious?" asked a friend a year or two ago. "I've done religion," said Mr. Caine, calmly. "Social?" ventured the other. "I have finished the social problems," he replied with a touch of asperity. "Civilized man," he went on, "is complete in my books. Primitive man now awaits me. He will be ready on August 1; dramatized on October 15. I then turn to ideal love on a background of simplicity. I shall study it in the Vale of Cashmere, June 10 to June 20, both inclusive, 1905." Splendid executive ability, promptitude and push, head like a "dry-goods emporium," heart like a modern hotel, no costly whims or private prejudices, a man for the many and a publisher's delight, an inexpensive democratic Zeitgeist-we would rather own a hundred shares of stock in him than in any other industrial afloat. Ere this goes to print, Mr. Caine will have landed, and the berserker hum of the primitive passions confessing will be heard on all sides.

Speaking of "getting up" a novel, Mr. Henry James in his delightful essay in the August Atlantic has described the wonder he felt at some of Zola's attempts at it. He visited Zola twice, and his mind still dances at the recollection of the enormous horse-power of Zola's purpose. Once he asked him if his work left him any time for travel, and in particular if he had seen Italy

A country from which I had either just returned, or which I was luckily-not having the Natural History of a Family to count with -about to revisit. "All I've done, alas," he replied, "was the other year in the course of a little journey to the south, to my own paysall that has been possible was then to make a little dash as far as Geneva-a matter of a few days." Le Docteur Pascal, the conclusion of Les Rougon Macquart, had appeared but shortly before, and it further befell that I asked him what plans he had for the future, now that, still dans la force de l'âge, he had so cleared the ground. I shall never forget the fine promptitude of his answer-"Oh, I shall begin at once Les Trois Villes." "And which cities are they to be?" The reply was finer still-"Lourdes, Paris, Rome." It was splendid for confidence and cheer, but it left me, I fear, more or less gaping. He was an honest man-he had always bristled with it at every pore; but no artistic reverse was inconceivable for an adventurer who, relating in one breath that his knowledge of Italy consisted of a few days spent at Genoa, was ready to declare in the next that he had planned on a scale a picture of Rome.

Like Mr. Caine indomitably sailing the northern waters, Zola never turned back, and at the time appointed the three books appeared, not so much books, though, as three huge blocks of frozen purpose. But there is a sense of waste here quite lacking in the other instance. If he had not tied himself down, art might have flown away with him as it did in L'Assommoir, and we should all have been happy. Among authors, great men are best when they forget; little men when they remember. If there is nothing more particular in a man than there is in the papers he clips from, where is the waste? In literature the main thing is the person; in the market the main thing is other people; and while it is sad to think of Zola "getting up" Rome, it is altogether pleasant and edifying to know that Mr. Caine is

I

N looking backward over a century of caricature, it is interesting to ask just what it is that makes the radical difference between the cartoon of to-day and that of a hundred years ago. That there is a wide gulf between the comparative restraint of the modern cartoonist and the unbridled license of Gillray's or Rowlandson's grotesque, gargoyle types, is self-evident; that comic art, as applied to politics, is to-day more widespread, more generally appreciated, and in a quiet way more effective in moulding public opinion than ever before, needs no argument. And yet, if one stops to analyse the individual cartoons, to take them apart and discover the essence of their humour, the incisive edge of their irony and satire, one finds

that there is nothing really new in them; that the basic principles of caricature were all understood as well in the eighteenth century as in the nineteenth, and and that, in many cases, the successful cartoon of to-day is simply the replica of an old one of a past generation, modified to fit a new set of facts. When Gilbert Stuart drew his famous "Gerrymander" cartoon, he was probably not the first artist to avail himself of the chance resemblance of the geographical contour of a state or country to some person or animal. He certainly was not the last. Again and again the map of the United States has been drawn so as to bring out some significant similarity, as recently when it was distorted into a ludicrous semblance of Mr. Cleveland, bending low in proud