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cap on his forehead, was pouring down his face. His whole body was tingling and quivering with an almost insanity of rebellion against the impotence that held him powerless to aid his mate. He lacked the nerve to resume the slow chipping and chiselling of the rock which would be rendered doubly slow by his own appreciation of the agony he would be causing, and his mate's unconquerable resistance; yet upon him and upon his unshaken nerve depended, he knew, the life of his friend, aye, and his own reason.

It was a wild-eyed lunatic who presently rushed upward from the depths of the iron well, unscrewing his glass, and calling upon Bruce with inarticulate ravings and curses. The doctor was coming off, paddled by excited coolies; but though he travelled swiftly over the dazzling water, Tom Mair, pinned to the staging by his leadensoled boots, rocked in his divingdress, like a maddened elephant at its pickets, shook hands with writhing fingers above his head, and blasphemed with horrible vehemence, entreating him to hasten.

An idea had come to him,had taken possession of him. He knew now what he must do; had appraised the heavy risks, and felt as if each one of them were a red-hot goad driven deep into his naked soul. A cowardly demon within him was screaming to him that his idea was impossible,-that he could not carry it out,-that he lacked the nerve, that it was foredoomed to failure,

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that it was asking more of him than could fairly be asked of any man,-that he could never muster the resolution to penetrate again into the silence and the darkness wherein his mate lay in mortal, dumb agony. He dreaded every second of delay lest this devil should gain the mastery of him, and drive him into headlong flight from the spot where, hidden by the untroubled waters, Bunny Fitch lay tethered awfully to the river's bed.

The doctor took him roughly by the shoulder and shook him vigorously. "You've got to steady yourself, if you are going to be of any use," he said angrily. "Steady yourself, do you see? And here, drink this."

He helped Mair to pour a stiff tot of brandy down his throat, gripping his shaking hand with calm, capable fingers.

"There's nothing for it," Mair sobbed out. "I've got to cut his blooming arm off! O Gawd! That's what I've got to do, Gawd help me!"

The doctor made some rapid inquiries in a businesslike, professional manner, very soothing to Tom's lacerated nerves.

"Yes, my man," he said, when he had assured himself as to the position. "Amputation is the only chance, and you must try it; but remember, you've got to be quick-mighty quick-and you've got to be sure. As soon as you cut the rubber of his diving-dress he'll begin to drown if you bungle the job. Now, let me feel your pulse. Galloping like a race

horse. Here. Take another in his long agony.

drop of brandy, and pull your self together. You're a good workman, they tell me, and you've got an uncommon ticklish job in hand. Don't bungle it. Remember your mate's life depends upon your skill and pluck. Is that the sharpest axe you've got, Bruce?"

Bruce nodded silently. He handed a short wood-axe to Mair, who felt its keen edge gingerly with his thumb. He too was silent, but as he began to screw on his glass his face was working convulsively, and tears were pouring unheeded down his cheeks.

Again the big automaton-a figure robbed magically of all outward expression of emotion -began to climb down the ladder, and presently was swallowed up again by the disturbed water. Bruce, the doctor, and the coolies stood craning their necks to gaze into the baffling depths below them.

Mair, usually so quick, moved with slow, reluctant deliberation down the ladder. The wild excitement of a few moments earlier had died down in him, and had been succeeded by a kind of cold despair. The brandy had steadied him. He was bracing himself consciously against the ordeal which awaited him down there in the place of horror whereof the terrors presented themselves every instant more and more vividly to his imagination. Vicariously he seemed to be enduring every pang that was torturing the mind and rending the body of poor Bunny Fitch

VOL. CXCII.-NO. MCLXIII.

His own

arm throbbed and tingled in sympathy. In fancy he could feel the cruel shock which each blow of the chisel on the rock had dealt to his mate. Already, it seemed to him, that the still more fierce pain, which the first stroke of the axe upon yielding rubber and flesh would inflict upon Bunny, was stabbing him,-that and the panic fear of death by drowning. Yet now his will was set upon the task awaiting him. It was the only chance. He gritted his teeth together, drew his muscles taut, and nailed himself to his duty. The cowardly devil was subdued and silenced; only Mair moved slowly, seeking thereby to delude himself into the belief that he had regained his calm.

Arrived at the bottom, he once more explored with his fingers the precise position of the tethered arm. The cylinder and the rock had gripped it with a vice-like clasp a couple of inches above the wrist. The hand beyond the cylinder's edge must be lying palm-downward. Tom Mair, of course, could see nothing; but touch with him had become a sense almost as accurate as that of sight. At the end of three or four minutes of careful and minute groping, during which the very soul of him seemed to have passed into his fingertips, he had obtained as exact an appreciation of the relative positions of arm, rock, and cylinder-edge as if he had examined them with his naked eye. For the rest, he was used to hitting the top of a hidden

2 A

for hours a-day with force and

accuracy.

chisel with an invisible hammer water-logged prison swiftly to the surface. The doctor, aided by Bruce, was busy tying the arteries of Bunny's arm by the time Mair had succeeded in scrambling up the ladder and had unscrewed his glass.

He drew in his breath, and bit his under-lip hard; poised the axe, lowered it slowly, measuring his distances, and then brought it down upon Bunny's arm. He felt the blade eat deep into flesh and bone, and was conscious of the insuck of the water through the rent in the rubber casing. Also he felt Bunny quiver and flounder beneath him as the diving-dress filled with water, but he had taken the precaution to grip him with his knees to prevent active interference. Quick as light, he struck again, and yet again; knew that he had severed the arm; signalled wildly to the linesman, and felt Bunny Fitch's body suddenly snatched away from him, as the man at the cylinder's mouth drew him and

his

"A very clean bit of surgery," the doctor remarked cheerfully, a few moments later, "though I'll make a better job of it presently when I get him ashore. Well done, young man ! You've saved this fellow's life."

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HOCKEN AND HUNKEN.

A TALE OF TROY.

BY "Q."

CHAPTER XIV.-THE LETTERS.

HAVING breakfasted, read his newspaper, and smoked his pipe (and still no sign of the missing 'Bias), Cai brushed his hat and set forth to pay a call on Mr Peter Benny.

This Mr Peter Benny-father of Mr Shake Benny, whose acquaintance we have already made-was a white-haired little man who had known many cares in life, but had preserved through them all a passionate devotion to literature and an entirely simple heart: and these two had made life romantic for him, albeit his cares had been the very ordinary ones of a poor clerk with a long family of boys and girls, all of whom-his wife aiding-he had brought up to fear the Lord and seen fairly started in life. Towards the close of the struggle Fortune had chosen to smile, rewarding him with the stewardship of Damelioe, an estate lying beside the river some miles above Troy. This was a fine exchange against a beggarly clerkship, even for a man so honest as Peter Benny. But he did not hold it long. On the death of his wife, which happened in the fifth year of their prosperity, he had chosen to retire on a small pension, to inhabit again (but alone) the

waterside cottage which in old days the children had filled to overflowing, and to potter at literary composition in the wooden outhouse where he had been used, after office hours, to eke out his £52 salary by composing letters for seamen.

He retained his methodical habits, and Cai found him already at work in the outhouse, and thoroughly enjoying a task which might have daunted one of less boyish confidence. He was, in fact, recasting the 'Fasti' of Ovid into English verse, using for that purpose a spirited, if literal, prose translation (published by Mr Bohn) in default of the original, from which his ignorance of the Latin language precluded him. For a taste:

"What sea, what land, knows not Arion's fame?

The rivers by his song were turned as stiff as glass:

The hungry wolf stood still, the lamb Pursuing and pursued, producing an

did much the same

impasse

But while delighting in this labour, Mr Benny was at any time ready, nay eager, for a chat. At Cai's entrance he pushed up his spectacles and beamed.

Copyright in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

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"His 'Raven'; a poem about a bird that perched itself upon a bust and kept saying 'Nevermore,' like a parrot."

Cai winced. "On a bust, did you say? Whose bust?"

"A bust of Pallas, sir, in the alleged possession of Mr Poe himself: Pallas being otherwise Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, usually represented with an Owl."

"I don't know much about birds," confessed Cai, reduced to helplessness by this erudition. "And I don't know anything about poetry, more's the pity-having been caught young and apprenticed to the

sea.

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"And nothing to be ashamed of in that, Captain Hocken!

'The sea, the sea, the open seaThe blue, the fresh, the ever free.' I daresay you've often felt like that about it, as did the late Barry Cornwall, otherwise Bryan Waller Procter, whose daughter, the gifted Adelaide Anne Procter, prior to her premature decease, composed The Lost Chord,' everywhere so popular as a cornet solo. It is one of the curiosities of

literature," went on Mr Benny confidentially, "that the author of that breezy, not to say briny outburst could not even cross from Dover to Calais without being prostrated by mal de mer; insomuch that his good lady (who happened, by the way, to survive him for a number of years, and, in fact, died quite recently), being of a satirical humour, and herself immune from that distressing complaint, used as I once read in a magazine article-to walk up and down the deck before him on these occasions, mischievously quoting his own verses,

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