from the ground, wrapped it about his left arm, and with a screaming huée! charged down upon the foe.

At the very outset the wings of the dastard troop folded back before the furious onrush, leaving the formation a wedge. The point of this the soldier crumpled up, thrusting and threshing. His blade flung aloft a spray of crimson; the whole hotch-potch of writhing shapes seemed to boil into

won.

hideous jangle; he shrieked again and again as he drove his way into it. Then in a moment the pass was The pack, recoiling upon its rear to escape the swingeing flail, fell into demoralisation, showed its panic tail, and went off in a wind of uproar down the glen.

The instant they were vanished, the monk and his companion descended from their coign of " reserve." The soldier held out his dripping weapon mutely, and with a stare of scorn.

"It is, in truth, a blade worthy of the arm that wields it," cried the priest cringingly. His voice shook. He kept glancing furtively at the peasant by his side. This man's eyes had a strange glare in them, and his mouth was dribbling. Corporal Lacoste cleansed his sword scrupulously on the cloak he had appropriated.

"Dishonouring blood," he said, "for the imbruing of a noble weapon! But corne et tonnerre!-a king must take tribute of chief and villain alike. At least, now, the stain is wiped away."

He ran the sword back into its scabbard with a clank.

"En avant!" he cried disdainfully, and swaggered off down the defile.

Perhaps for a mile they proceeded in this order, the beau sabreur indulging his fancy with a priest and a peasant for lackeys. Now and again he would turn and cry "Which way?"-but, for the rest, he condescended to no familiarity with cravens.

By-and-by the dead air lightened, the trees thinning so as to make but a ragged canopy of the snow overhead. Then the toiling monk quavered out a "halt!" to him that strode in front.

66

'How, then!" exclaimed Corporal Lacoste, facing about.

The two men advanced. The peasant passed the trooper a half-dozen paces, and wheeled round softly. They were all by then come into a little open dell, drowsy with snow, into which the fog drooped from above, like smoke in the down-draught of a chimney. Not a twig of all the laden bushes stirred. The very heart of nature, frozen and constricted, had ceased of its audible beating.

The priest pulled his cowl farther over his eyes.

"My God, the cold!" he muttered. Then he appeared to shudder himself into fury.

"Have we not brought you far enough? Thither goes the road to St Pölten and Wien. Mein Gott, the assurance, the assurance- !"

He leapt back. The point of the wolf's tooth had almost pricked him as it shot through Corporal Lacoste's throat. "Stehen sie auf! ah, you devil!" he sobbed, as the dogman threw himself upon the quivering tumbled body, snarling and quarrelling with the knife that would not be withdrawn.

Suddenly a terrible lust overtook the onlooker. He tore the trooper's sword from its sheath and slashed at the senseless face till the blade streamed.

"The blood of a wolf!" he screeched," of a ravisher and despoiler! Unbuckle me the scabbard. It shall stay here the red shall stay, and mingle presently, for all his boasting, with that of the beasts to which he was kin!"

For long the winged flakes had fallen, the huddled labyrinths of the forest been dense as with the myriad settling of ghost-moths. Here, indeed, was the spinning-mill of Fate, drawing steadily, relentlessly, from the loaded distaff of the clouds, working an impenetrable warp for the snaring of forfeited lives. Lost, gasping, and horrorstricken, the monk stumbled aimlessly onward, the trooper's sheathed sword clasped convulsively-half unconsciously under his arm, the trooper's gold clinking in his mendicant pouch. He beat his way anywhither among the glimmering trunks, and the terror of hell was in his soul.

For, not a hundred paces of their return journey had the murderers traversed, when the

blinding hood of the snowwraith shut upon the shameful scene-upon all the woodlands of Amstetten, blotting out the voiceless passes, obscuring and confusing the familiar avenues of retreat.

Too well then these

men realised, out of their knowledge of it, the menace of the dumb eclipse of the trackless silence that no instinct might interpret. But the fulness of dismay was for one only of the two.

In a minute they were astray; at the end of an hour, two hours, they were still ice-bound wanderers-white spectres of the living death. And so at last the natural dusk, weaving weft into warp of darkness, had crept upon them; and a greater fear, long - foreshadowed, had knocked at the priest's heart— a sickening thud to every step he took. Then his eyes, straining in the inhuman blackness, would seek frantically to resolve the character of that that pattered at his side; and he had jibbed as he walked, daring neither to question nor to touch.

Suddenly an attenuated whimper, that swelled to a piercing yaup, had sounded at his very ear, and something had leapt from his neighbourhood and gone scurrying into the darkness.

Then he knew that what he had dreaded had befallen, and the utter ecstasy of horror entered into and possessed his soul.

Now, all in a moment, he broke from the thronged terrorism of trees into a little ghastly glen. A bursting sigh, compound of a dozen clashing emotions, issued from his lungs.

He could faintly see here once more; and he knew himself to have happened upon that very pass wherein he had been busy in the morning imbruing his hands, by wolfish proxy, in the blood of the wounded.

But he had not climbed a score of yards up the slope in a whirl of flakes when a guttural sound, that seemed to come from almost under his feet, shocked him to a pause. He stood, forcibly striving to constrict his heart lest the thud of it knocking on his ribs should betray him. For the wolves were in the glen again. His every nerve jumped to the consciousness of their neighbourhood.

The swinish sound went on. Suddenly the ticking wheel of Life touched off its alarum. Wrought to the topping-pitch of endurance, he gave way, uttering scream after scream in a mere paralysis of fright. The whole glen seemed to howl in echo there came a snarling rush.

Who had shouted it?" The sword of Corporal Lacoste!" The cry, he could have sworn, clanged in his frantic ears. It rallied him to recollection of

The

what he held in his hand. sword! At least, in his despair, he could endeavour to do with it as he had seen done.

A score of rabid snouts budded through the gloom before him. He clutched at the hilt. Some latent memory, perhaps, of the stinging thrash of the weapon it looked upon kept the pack at bay a moment. But clutch and tear as the priest might, the blade would not come forth. The lust of hatred that had sheathed it, wet with the life of its victim, had recoiled upon itself. Corporal Lacoste still claimed his sword-claimed it by testimony of his blood, that had dried upon it, gluing it within its scabbard.

A low laugh issued from the thick of the pack-an unearthly bark confusedly blended of the utterance of beast and man. It was as if some one brute, intelligent above his fellows, had realised the humour of the situation.

A grey snout, grinning and slavering from a single long tooth, came nozzling itself through the herd.

The priest screamed and fell upon his knees.

BERNARD CAPES.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD has suffered in all their bitterness the miseries of an indiscreet fame. To be celebrated unworthily is to be misunderstood; and despite his unsought glory the author of 'Une Saison en Enfer' has been infamously treated by those who affect his worship. The works which he refused to publish have been printed in a dozen treacherous forms; more than one wit has forged successfully the poet's style; and at the very moment when he deemed himself forgotten, he was the chosen leader of a new school, the unconscious apostle of a foolish creed. Worse than this, the gossips laid hold of his life, and, ignorant of his maturer heroism, discovered a picturesque element in the unproved vices of his youth. So that he who shunned publicity has been vilified in the light of day; his works, unique prophecy of unfulfilled genius, have been hawked, despite his own suppression, upon every bookstall; and for long we have read his heroic adventures, and have studied his marvellous poems with a half - felt confession that we are looking over an unknown shoulder. But at last our curiosity is justified. A pious, if not too tactful, hand has drawn aside the veil, and we are not only confronted by the authentic text of the poet's works, but by the authentic record of his curious career.

We may easily question any man's right to violate a pur

posed secrecy; but those who are responsible for the perfect revelation of Rimbaud's life and poetry have an abundant excuse: they were driven to publish by the indiscretions of others, and they have discharged no more than the duty imposed upon them of vindicating their hero's memory. Had he died obscure, they should have respected his obscurity: traduced by halfknowledge, he must needs submit to the frank revelation of his friends.

He was already a legend, when his name was unheard outside the taverns of the Latin Quarter. From time to time came rumours of his death, and still more often echoes of his unaccustomed, intrepid career. Meanwhile, the foolish man who seeks a nerveless solace in the vices of others overlooked the talent of Rimbaud in the false record of his boyish indiscretion; and it seems worth while, now that the material is at hand, to brush away the scandals, and to draw an imperfect portrait of this misjudged poet. Arthur Rimbaud, then, then, was born at Charleville, of well-todo parents, in 1854. No sooner was he sent to school than he displayed the astounding precocity which a few years later made him the wonder of Paris, and which, maybe, destroyed him at what, for the most of men, is the beginning of a career. His sense of literature was in

stinctive, and an insubordinate indolence was no bar to the