CHARLES GRANT BLAIRFINDIE ALLEN.

ALLEN, CHARLES GRANT BLAIRFINDIE, commonly known as Grant Allen, - who has also written under the nom de plume both of Cecil Power and J. Arbuthnot Wilson, -a British scientific writer and novelist, was born February 24, 1848, on Wolfe Island, opposite Kingston, Canada, where his father was the incumbent of the Anglican Church. He graduated at Oxford in 1871. In 1873 he was appointed Professor of Logic and Philosophy at Queen's College, Spanish Town, Jamaica, and from 1874 until 1877 was its principal. He then returned to England, where he has since lived. Among his scientific writings are: "Physiological Ethics" (1877); "The Color Sense" (1879); "The Evolutionist at Large " (1881); "Colin Clout's Calendar" (1882); and "Force and Energy" (1888). Among his most popular novels are: "In All Shades" (1886) and "This Mortal Coil" (1888). His most recent publications are: "What's Bred in the Bone" (Boston, 1891), a prize story, for which he received £1000; "Dumaresq's Daughter" (1891); "The Duchess of Powysland" (1891); "Blood Royal" (1893); "Dr. Palliser's Patient; " "The Attis of Catullus;""Science in Arcady; "The Story of the Plants;" "The Woman Who Did;" "British Barbarians" (1895); and "A Hill-top Novel" (1896). He has also contributed a series of papers, "Post-prandial Philosophy," to the "Westminster Gazette." In 1897 he published "The Evolution of the Idea of God."

SAVED FROM THE QUICKSANDS.

(From "Kalee's Shrine.")

MEANWHILE, where were Harry Bickersteth and Alan Tennant?

Up the river in the "Indian Princess" they had had an easy voyage, lazily paddling for the first hour or two. The mud banks of the Thore, ugly as they seem at first sight, have nevertheless a singular and unwonted interest of their own; the interest derived from pure weirdness, and melancholy, and loneliness a strange contrast to the bustling life and gayety of the bright little watering place whose church tower rises con

spicuously visible over the dikes beyond them. On the vast soft ooze flats, solemn gulls stalk soberly, upheld by their broad, web feet from sinking, while among the numberless torrents, caused by the ebbing tide, tall, long-legged herons stand with arched necks and eager eyes, keenly intent on the quick pursuit of the elusive elves in the stream below. The grass wrack waves dark in the current underneath, and the pretty sea lavender purples the muddy islets in the side channels with its scentless bloom. Altogether a strange, quaint, desolate spot, that Thore estuary, bounded on either side by marshy saltings, where long-horned black cattle wander unrestrained, and high embankments keep out the encroaching sea at floods and spring tides. Not a house or a cottage lies anywhere in sight. Miles upon miles of slush in the inundated channels give place beyond to miles upon miles of drained and reclaimed marsh land by the uninhabited saltings in the rear.

They had paddled their way quietly and noiselessly among the flats and islets for a couple of hours, carefully noting the marks of the wary wild-fowl on either side, and talking in low tones together about that perennial topic of living interest to all past or present generations of Oxford men, the dear old 'Varsity. Alan still held a fellowship at Oriel, and Harry was an undergraduate of Queen's: so the two found plenty of matter to converse about in common, comparing notes as to the deeds of daring in bearding the proctors, feats of prowess in town and gown rows, the fatal obsequiousness of the Oxford tradesman, and the inevitable, final evolutionary avatar of that mild being under a new and terrible form as the persistent dun, to the end of their tether. Such memories are sweet when sufficiently remote; and the Oxford man who does not love to talk them over with the rising spirits of a younger generation deserves never to have drunk Archdeacon at Merton or to have smoked Bacon's best Manilas beneath the hospitable rafters of Christ Church common room.

At last, in turning up a side streamlet, on the southern bank, Thorborough, as everybody knows, lies to the northward, they passed an islet of the usual soft Thore slime, on whose tiny summit grew a big bunch of that particular local East Anglian wild flower, which Olga had said she would like to paint, on the day of Sir Donald Mackinnon's picnic.

"I say, Bickersteth," Alan suggested lightly, as they passed close beneath it, don't you think we could manage to pick a

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stem or two of the artemisia that feathery fluffy yellow flower there? Miss Trevelyan" — and he tried not to look too conscious "wants to make a little picture out of it, she told me. I expect we could pull in and get near enough to clutch at a branch or so.

"No," Harry answered, shaking his head confidently. "I know by heart all the tricks and manners of the creeks and the river here. I know every twist and turn of the backwaters. No quicksand on earth could possibly be more treacherous than our Thore mud. It's a mud per se, quite unique in its own way for stickiness. If you try to land on it, you go on sinking, sinking, sinking, like an elephant in a bog, or a Siberian mammoth, till you disappear at last bodily below the surface with a gentle gurgle; and the mud closes neatly over your head; and they fish you out a few days later with a crooked boat-hook, as Mr. Mantalini says, a demd moist unpleasant corpse,' and dirty at that into the bargain. You must wait and get a bit There's plenty more growing can land easier there on some of the hards, where the side creeks run deep and clear over solid pebble bottoms."

of the stuff a little further on. higher up the backwater.

We

They paddled on noiselessly through the water as before, away up the silent, unpeopled inlet, among the lonely ooze and great stranded islands of salt-marsh vegetation. At every stroke, the aspect of the country grew wilder and more desolate. At last they came to a broad expansion of the tributary creek. Alan could hardly have believed any place so solitary existed in England. Some of the islands, surrounded on every side by slimy channels of deep ooze, could only be approached by a boat at high spring tides, and even then nowhere save at a single unobtrusive landing place. They were thickly overgrown with rank, brown hay.

"And even the owners," Harry said. laughing, and pointing to one such dreary flat with demonstrative finger, "only visit them once a year in a shallow punt or low barge at haymaking time to cut the hay crop. Sometimes the bargemen from upstream at Ponton come for a lark in the night, before the owner harvests it, and mow the crop, and carry it away down the river and out by sea to market in London; and nobody ever knows a word about it till the owner turns up disconsolate a week or so later, and finds his hay clean gone, and not a soul on earth to tell him what the dickens has ever become of it."

"It's fearfully lonely," Alan said with a shudder, looking round him in surprise at the trackless waste of ooze and sedges. "If a man were to get lost or murdered in one of these dreary channels now, it might be weeks and weeks-ay, and years too before anybody on earth ever discovered him."

"It might," Harry answered. capital place indeed for a murder.

"You say the truth. Α As De Quincey says, you

could recommend it confidently to a friend. Nobody 'd ever be one penny the wiser. See, there's some more of flower your nodding away on the bank over yonder what did you call it? artemisia, was n't it? Well, here we can get at it, I expect, with a little trouble, if you don't mind wading. You're prepared to go through fire and water, I suppose, for Miss Trevelyan?"

Alan's face grew somewhat graver. "I'm prepared to get my bags wet through in the sea," he said, "if that's all, to do anything reasonable, for any lady. Miss Trevelyan said she'd like the flower, and I thought I might as well try to get a little bit for her."

"Well, you need n't be so huffy about it, anyhow," Harry went on good-humoredly. "No harm in being in love with a pretty girl, that I know of: at least it does n't say so in the Ten Commandments. Stick the pole firm into the bottom there, will you? By Jove, the stream runs fast! How deep is it? About two feet, eh? Well, we can tuck our trousers up to the thighs and wade ahead then. The channel of the stream's firm enough here. Pebble bottom! I expect it's pebble right up to the island."

They pulled off their shoes and socks hurriedly, and rolled up their trousers as Harry had suggested. Then the younger lad stepped lightly out of the boat on to the solid floor, and drove the pole deep into the slimy mud bank beside it. The mud rose in a veritable cliff, and seemed to the eye quite firm and consistent; but it gave before the pole like slush in the street, where the brushes have heaped it on one side by the gutters. He tied the duck boat to the pole by the painter, and gave a hand to Alan as his friend stepped out with a light foot into the midst of the little rapid channel.

"You need n't

"Bottom 's quite solid just here,” he said. funk it. We can walk close up to the side of the island. These streams run regularly over hard bottoms, though the mud rises sheer on either side of them, till you get quite up to the head waters. There they lose themselves, as it were, in the mud; or

at least, ooze out of it by little driblets from nowhere in particular. Come along, Tennant. We can pick some of Miss Trevelyan's spécialité on the far side of the island, I fancy."

They waded slowly up the rapid current, Alan pushing his stick as he went into the mud bank, which looked as firm and solid as a rock, but really proved on nearer trial to be made up of deep, soft, light-brown slush. They attacked the island from every side a double current ran right round it — but all in vain; an impenetrable barrier of oozy mud girt it round unassailably on every side, like the moat of a castle.

"I shall try to walk through it," Alan cried at last, in a sort of mock desperation, planting one foot boldly in the midst of the mud. "What's slush and dirt, however thick, compared with the expressed wishes of a fair lady?”

As he spoke, he began to sink ominously into the soft deep ooze, till his leg was covered right up to the thigh.

Harry seized his arm with a nervous grasp in instant trepidation. "For Heaven's sake," he cried, "what are you doing, Tennant? The stuff 's got no bottom at all. Jump back, jump back here, take my hand for it! You'll sink right down into an endless mud slough."

Alan felt himself still sinking; but instead of drawing back as Harry told him, and letting his whole weight fall on to the one foot still securely planted on the solid bed of the little river, he lifted that one safe support right off the ground, and tried with his stick to find a foothold in the treacherous mud bank. Next instant, he had sunk with both legs up to his waist, and was struggling. vainly to recover his position by grasping at the overhanging weeds on the island.

Harry, with wonderful presence of mind, did not try at all to save him as he stood, lest both should tumble together into the slough; but running back hastily for the pole, fastened the boat to his own walking stick which he stuck into the mud, and brought back the longer piece of wood in his hands to where Alan stood, still struggling violently, and sunk to the armpits in the devouring slush. He took his own stand firmly on the pebbly bottom of the little stream, stuck the far end of the pole on the surface of the island, and then lowered it to the level of Alan's hands, so as to form a sort of rude extemporized crane or lever. Alan clutched at it quickly with eager grip; and Harry, who was a strong young fellow enough, gradually raised him out of the encumbering mud by lifting the pole to the