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be kept in it. And they don't believe in government by the light of common sense, or cheap education, or free wash-houses; no, nor in the march of events, nor the Irish and if any one goes down there again and offers them three acres and a cow, they will take him by the sleeve and lead him through the town, past the pump, the churchyard, the quiet little ale-house, and Miss Crump's Academy, and so on till they come to the horsepond.

The company were grateful to the quiet man with the pince-nez for the hearty laughs he had given them, and congratulated each other on the process of evolution by which they had at last secured a story without either ghosts or murders. Their satisfaction, however, was short-lived, for they were betrayed into a political discussion very different in its character from the delicate humor which had provoked it. What was said, and who said it, may not be told here now that the incident has already become ancient history; but if the Novelist, who knew little about English politics and cared less, had not skillfully changed the subject in an athletico-literary manner, there would probably have been other broken things on board besides the shaft.

The Eminent Tragedian spent the next day alone, and only one little incident broke its monotony. After lunch he was standing by himself under the bridge, when he caught sight of a couple right up in the bows of the vessel. The two "look-outs" in their yellow oilskins and long sea-boots were stamping up and down their round on the forward deck; but farther forward still, in the very nose of the ship, a reckless young couple were seated, apparently enjoying to the full the novel excitement of their position. The lady was clad from head to foot in a long soft gray ulster, and a hat of the

same material was tied closely down on the masses of her bright hair, but proved entirely unable to keep the wind from playing havoc with it. She was seated on a low stanchion, so that only her head was above the bulwarks and exposed to the force of the wind. Her companion sat behind her upon the lower end of the great wire shroud running to the foremast head, steadying himself against the bulwarks with his left hand, and with his right grasping the shroud above his head. As the ship pitched, the couple in the bows went up until the vessel seemed to be stretching forward into a great green abyss of swirling waters, and then a moment later they went down and down, and the wave in front came rushing up the bows until it was within a few yards of them—a yard, almost a foot-and the two crouched low, and the man's hand slid gently down the shroud till it was just behind his fair companion, in readiness to grasp her if the rushing water should come any higher. Several times he seemed to relinquish with reluctance the necessity of putting his arm round her waist. It was a pretty sight, and the Eminent Tragedian was heartily sorry when the officer on the bridge caught sight of them, and instantly dispatched the boatswain to bring them back with a severe reprimand.

When evening came the appetite for fiction brought reconciliation, and, with many expressions of polite regret that they had not met earlier in the day, the company drew together again in a sheltered spot on deck. Little though they suspected it, the story they then heard was to be the last. It was this one:

LOVE AND LIGHTNING.

BY HENRY NORMAN.

I.

WHEN Mr. Tate had finished adding up the sums upon a number of pieces of paper scattered over his desk, and had found that the total could not be expressed in fewer than seven figures, and that the first of those figures was a five, his consternation was not materially lessened by the further fact that the other six were all naughts. And as he laid down his pen and pushed himself back from his desk, and looked up at as much of the September sky as the soup-like atmosphere of the city and the little square panes of his office window permitted him to see, he realized more accurately than ever before that he was playing a very big game indeed. He had been a "bear" for a good many weeks, and here and there, openly and secretly, confidently and doubtingly, to friends and foes, he had steadily sold Whatbosh Preferred, until he had reached this total of five millions of dollars, which now stared him in the face. There was no doubt about it—it was a big game. But the mere magnitude of the figures was not the sole cause of Mr. Tate's

consternation; he had often been a "bull" and a "bear" at big figures before now, and the consciousness of having sold five million dollars' worth of something he did not possess was not in itself sufficient to shake the nerves of an operator of his position and reputation. Moreover, he had gone into this with his eyes wide open—he had considered the matter beforehand in every possible light; something great had been forced upon him, and he had chosen his course after wrestling in calculation as many people would have wrestled in prayer. He had taken time by the forelock, he had grasped the skirts of happy chance, he had cast the die, he had crossed the Rubicon, he had burned his bridges, he had put his fate to the touch, he had taken his tide at the flood-sink or swim, live or die, double or quits, now or never-it was in one or other of these aspects that his enterprise presented itself to his mind, according to the literary recollection or commercial saw that served him at the moment. He knew exactly the risk he was running, and therefore the vision of the Stock Exchange, with its surging, shouting, mad, pitiless crowds, had already exerted upon him all its power.

But there was something apart from finance involved in those seven figures-something before which his nerves were as water, something which made his forehead feel damp as he passed his hand almost tremblingly over it. There are only two things which make real cowards of strong men-conscience and woman. And Mr. Tate's

conscience was thoroughly of the kind essential to a man who gathers to himself other people's fortunes by selling what he has not got, and buying what he does not want. As he sat there in the safe and sacred privacy of his inner office, with his luxurious roll-top desk before him, its pigeon-holes bursting with their bundles of papers of all shades of white, and yellow, and blue, his eyes rested on nothing more suggestive to the imagination than several scores of tin boxes stacked against the wall; but it was none of these that he saw. He had forgotten the Stock Exchange, he had forgotten the city, he had forgotten even the five million dollars, and he was walking down a long garden-path, with a little swinging gate at the end of it leading into an old orchard, and he was listening to a voice which seemed to him more like the music of running water than anything else he had ever heard, and he was trying for the thousandth time to decipher the inner meaning of its simple words. "If one only had the power," it was saying "if one could only do something instead of thinking and thinking about it all day long, and sometimes praying-if one could only catch men's ears and make them listen and obey-if one had only some weapon besides one's longing woman's heart "—and he had replied with such trepidation as he had never known when waiting for the fall of the hammer on settling-day, which might make him almost a beggar, "I don't believe that a woman with such a heart, if she's willing enough with it, has much to do but accept all the power

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