pointed to Za'khuran. To Za'khuran therefore the miniature army took its way, leaving me divided between regret for the disturbance which my own carelessness had brought about, and gratitude for the good will displayed on every side. So difficult, however, had it become to protect the innocent, that but for the notebooks I should have left the guilty in peace. My servants were plunged in grief; their honour was gone indeed whose honour was left intact? -and in sackcloth and ashes we passed the day. And then ... in the grey dawn we were wakened by a voice shouting from the hills: "Your goods are here! your goods are here!" Every man in the camp leapt up and ran in the direction of the sound, and there, lying upon a rock among the oak-scrub, was all that we had lost. Nothing had been injured, nothing was missing except some money money which was subsequently refunded to me by the Ottoman Government, at the instance of the British vice-consul in Diarbekr-and it may well be questioned whether any other government would have recognised a like liability.

The

villagers of Khakh assembled round the tents and shed tears of thankfulness over the recovered objects, and I mounted in haste and rode off to Za'khuran to set a term to the pursuit of criminals. The cause of the restitution was there apparent. The village was deserted: men, women, and children had fled into the

hills, taking with them all that they possessed, and it was reported by a picket that the Chelabi and the soldiers were engaged in capturing their flocks. I sent a messenger after them, and rode myself to Midyad to ask for a universal amnesty. Revenge is not so sweet as it is said to be, nor is it so easy when wrong is afoot to determine who is the more wronged.

Nevertheless it was with a firm determination to return that I left the Mount of the Servants of God. It is almost inexplicable that the wealth of Early Christian monuments gathered gathered together in these hills should have escaped the attention of historians and archeologists, and I feel persuaded that the field is not yet exhausted, and that the great period of architectural creation which has left such splendid vestiges in the Tur Abdin will be traced in the regions north of the Tigris, as well as in the towns and villages which are scattered along the northern edge of the Mesopotamian deserts. In Edessa Christian shrines have existed, it is known, as early as the second century; at Nisibis there are ruins which belong to the same period as those of the Tur Abdin. These cities must have been the centres of activity of the Asiatic churches, which, cut off from the West no less by the decrees of Ecumenical Councils than by the armies of the Persian and the Arab, preserve to this day an honourable tradition and the walls of ancient fanes.

GERTRUDE LOWTHIAN BELL.

IT was like the man, that, finding his protégée pursuing, as it seemed, for private reasons of her own, some inexplicable line of equivocation, he should be inclined to set the incident aside and ask for no explanation. He was ever one who shrank from the revelation of any weakness in the things of his affection. worse poltroonery than any screaming! -her flight was so ungracious and so rude. First she had flushed and then she had blenched at the disclosure; gave a frightened glance of mute appeal to Norah, looked angrily at himself, and then dashed wildly from the room, a shocking figure of inelegant and coward haste.

He whistled his surprise and had recourse to another pipe, which he began to fill in silence. Norah watched him curiously, waiting in vain for questions.

"Did she really charge herself with that ridiculous scream?" she asked at last, incapable of bearing any longer a silence worse than wild denunciation.

"Yes, yes!" he exclaimed, with a start, as if that point had not before occurred to him. "I suppose she did take the blame of it to shield your reputation. That doesn't, someway, make the situation any better; I'm sorry you should have given her the occasion for that particular kind of generosity."

"What! would you rather she had screamed than I?" asked his cousin, with eyes averted.

"It's a double shock to find that you're a little weaker than I thought you, and that Pen is capable of dissimulation," he replied. "I'm half inclined to wish I had never been undeceived."

"Why?" she asked, and he looked uneasy.

"That's a secret of my own. But why did you scream? so unlike you!"

"That's my secret," said Norah abruptly.

"And why should Pen, who seems to be your superior in physical courage, be so timid morally as to fly from the revelation of her magnanimous deceit?"

"That's her secret," said his cousin. "I fancy I can guess, but I'm not going to tell you," and she left the room to seek for Pen, whom she found in the

refuge of Mrs Powrie's room, darning furiously, as if a stocking were a reputation.

Sir Andrew, full of troubled thoughts that might have seemed ridiculous as emerging from an incident so trivial as a girl's dissimulation in the interest of her friend, rode that afternoon over half the parish: galloping down misgivings, conjectures, and chagrins that astonished and alarmed himself. To any casual observer it might seem as if the Hunt were up again. The outer man of him busied itself, here in counsel with the woodmen trenching already behind the mill, or with drainers kneedeep in morass, burying Athabascas in the shape of tiles; there with his herdsmen tending the shaggy cattle whose sullen fires appeared to him to indicate the prisoned souls of clansmen in a brutal incarnation; but deep within him, all the time, was an unrest that abides even in the uproar and horror of battlefields. The day abetted his discomforter; the afternoon was cold, a touch of frost already was on the kail of wayside gardens; leaves were dropping without breath of wind; a grey sky lowered upon the glens; melancholy disengaged itself from coppice, field, and ditch. For months he had been happyhow serene and glad from day to day he only now discovered; here were the old brown devils back again! Past the cromlechs in whose shadows, circling from age to age upon the plain, he had stood so many wondering hours in youth, he sped as

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VOL. CLXXXVIII.—NO. MCXXXIX,

by things unholy and abhorrent, blameful and portending; communion with them now would only add to his despondency; he desired to speak with men!

with men!-with men! It was with a feeling of satisfaction he found, as he neared the village on his homeward way, that the mare had cast a shoe and given him an excuse for stopping at the smithy.

Already it was gloaming round the fire of Alick Brodie, that hour when all the morning's birds of gaiety fly home with battered wings to roost in hearts disconsolate. The low black felted smithy roof dropped a sleepy eyelid of wide eave above the doorway; its front was stained with pitch that always gave to it externally an aspect of the dusk and slumber. Within, its shape and bounds were lost in sombre shadows; only when Captain Cutlass bent low on the saddle to peer across the shut half-door, he saw in its depths dim faces against the jetty beams in the glow from the hearth when Alick blew his bellows; heard the low roar among the cinders, and sepulchral voices. 'Twas like a glimpse of the workshops where the gods gods are fashioning the shackles and the gyves of men, themselves condemned and helpless, toiling bitterly, or a cavern of the early world, pungent with ancient rites, with sizzling iron and seared horn. those within, himself stood out against the pensive landscape like a refugee from Flodden, like a beaten rider fled in the

2 c

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rout of battles. He dropped from the saddle wearily, and led in the mare. The blacksmith stopped his blowing; the flame retreated from the hearth, and in the trivial glow from the sooty skylight window the baronet looked about him, seeking to identify a company such as loves to gather on chilly autumn evenings round the warmth of smithy fires.

erin'. Everything's a guess except to the conceited idiot. But still-and-on there's a bellows somewhere, and someone yerkin' now and then upon the handle to heat the job that's to be hammered on the anvil. D'ye catch me, Alick?" "I'll be dashed if I dae!" said Alick honestly. "But I was only meant for bashin' airn and ca'in' nails." He picked up a leg of the mare and looked at the hoof where the shoe was missing. "That

"Oh ay! it's a smiddy right enough, Sir Andrew," said the blacksmith, pinching a cooling shoe; "but it would be a better smiddy if it had some sclates on't. The sarkin's done, and what the randy wants is a new roof a'thegither, if I could get it oot o' Mr Cattanach."

"Ye'll get that!" agreed Sir Andrew readily. "Never heed Mr Cattanach. A bonnylike thing if the rain drowned out the fires o' Cyclops or o' Vulcan for the want o' a sclated roof, and business so brisk ower yonder in Athabasca! I was thinkin' there, when I saw the shop for a minute lit wi' the lowe o' your fire, that life itsel's a country smiddy: maist o' the time we're in the shadow, hardly seein' each other's faces clearly, but now and then a wind blaws through the coalslack o' the spirit and we stand revealed."

"Whatna wind, Sir Andrew?" asked the blacksmith, clapping the mare upon the neck.

"God knows! I'm only haiv.

Andrew!" he exclaimed contemptuously; "I fit the shoe to the hoof and no' the hoof to the shoe, and somebody's been slashing awa' here wi' a knife. That's the way guid horse is spoiled."

"Ye're right!" agreed the baronet. "I had her shod in a hurry at the farrier's in Duntryne, and he talked about brittle feet, and hacked awa' like hey-my-nannie wi' his gully.'

"There's naething bates the rasp!" said the blacksmith, blowing up his fire again. "There wasna a knife in my faither's shop, and the farrier that uses yin should be kept to the job o' singein' sheep's-heids. But the chap in Duntryne was right in ae thing-the meare has shelly feet that's ill to shoe

-a delicate constitution."

"And what's the cause o' that, my ain Great Alexander?" inquired the baronet.

"Fine bred!" said the blacksmith drily. "Ye'll never can get the breed withoot a flaw in't somewhere, and it's often in the horn.'

"Better in the horn than in the heid or in the heart," said the baronet. "The flaws o' breed are no' confined to cattle, Alick; whiles I see them comin' out in folk. It's a world where naething's perfect."

"Exceptin' mongrel blacksmiths. And even they hae sometimes wooden legs," said Alick cheerfully.

In the volcanic flare from the fanned dross of the hearth Sir Andrew nodded to the men who sat on the stilts of ploughs or on discarded stithies. He passed round his tobacco while the blacksmith wrought; no unnatural restraint was in their manner, for the presence of Captain Cutlass never embarrassed any one in Schawfield, even when he idled away the time for which the Captain paid him wages; but he noticed in them signs that his advent had the nature of an interruption. They had been debating volubly when he rode up to the door; now their disputation was suspended.

"It's a wee cauld the nicht, Sir Andrew," said the miller's man, who had a horse in, too, for shoeing, and a vested right to the smith's immediate attention, second only to that of the laird himself.

"As cauld's a heidstane," said the baronet, and the black smith chuckled.

"That's what they ca' a coinsydence," he remarked, taking the foot of the mare between his knees. "It was just on heidstanes we were talkin' when ye cam' in. There's mair nor horse-shoes to be made at a

666 "Here Lies a Man,' he suggested. "That's a sufficient epitaph for the best and worst o' us.

The hale o' the story's there-the fun and the tribulation, health and sickness, the wind and the weet, the sun and the sleet, the lass and the glass may be, and the job at the hinder-end of course halfdone. 'Here Lies a Man!'it sums up a'. And it's mair than an epitaph,—it's an apologia,-it asks for some allowance on the part o' the Lord Almighty Who might hae made an angel."

"Wi' the sure and certain hope o' a glorious resurrection,'" suggested the miller's man, who was an elder; and the blacksmith, wiping his brow with a grimy hand, stood up and looked at him apprehensively.

"No' o' the body, Rubbert !" he exclaimed. "If ye say it's o' the body-a pheesical resurrection, I'm in a bonny habble, for I'll be like a man twice mairried, and I'll hae to choose between the leg I lost in 'Seventy-twa and Jessie.

I