drought, crept sullenly through a maze of sand-banks, the heat-haze was already dancing like a host of souls in torment. Further still, the dreary wastes of sandy plain spread away and away to a horizon misty with heat, blinding with their aching glare the eye that traversed them. Here and there a charred ruin rose like a spectre from the flatness of the sand-stretch emphasizing its melancholy.

out un

Nearer at hand also were marks of devastation-buildings blackened by fire, heaps of ashes, crumbling walls, piles of unsightly débris, above which rose the shattered domes of Hindu temples and the broken minarets of the mosques. For in this town of Cawnpúr the awful wrath of the white men had been written large for unlettered folk to read as they ran headlong, and punishment had been dealt sparingly to the professors of all creeds, to râja and to ra'iat, to serf and prince, to all whose skins were brown, with an indiscriminate, passionate fury which only the deeds that aroused it, and the latent savagery of human nature could explain, and that nothing could excuse or justify before the dreadful Judgment Seat of God.

Near the Well, whence after their third victory the hard-bit British veterans, weeping like hysterical women, or cursing brokenly with shameful, bitter blasphemies, had drawn out the mangled bodies of English ladies, and of little soft-limbed children-that Well whence the conquerors drew such an inexhaustible stream of hatred and lust of vengeance-there stood a rude scaffold. It was constructed of new, untrimmed timber, but it had seen much service since the flight of the Nana Sahib, and already it wore an air, businesslike and efficient, as of an object in frequent use. In front of it was the awful charnel house which every white man shunned, passing it with averted

eyes, and with muttered oath or prayer upon his lips. The tremendous fascination of tragedy had drawn each one of them with irresistible force to the doorway of that whitewashed prisonhouse, and peeping through it each in turn had seen fearful things reveal themselves the scars left by the hacks of sword-blades on the walls and in the corners, where trembling women and wailing children had crouched and cowered, seeking in vain to escape the cruel deaths that threatened them; a fair wisp of some poor, pretty, tender creature's hair, shorn from her head by the stroke that had been directed at her neck; the little woollen shoes of a baby, piteous things, torn and stained dreadfully; and everywhere blood, blood, bloodblood splashed high upon the walls, flooding them low down in great red wave-marks, and feeding the millions of flies that buzzed noisily above the stone floor, which was red and slippery. And each spectator had turned away from these sights, some sobbing, and with the hard tears of manhood on their cheeks, some grimacing hideously as they uttered furious curses and incoherent words, but one and all with the kind founts of pity and mercy dried up within them, with everything that they had possessed of humanity throttled in the grip of an overpowering hate, the very souls of them maddened by a longing for indiscriminate retaliation upon those whose skins proved them akin to the devils who had wrought these things.

"Allah! . . . Allah! . . . Al . . . lah !” Again that passionate outcry broke forth, and carried far and wide, appealing to the God of the Muhammadans, the God, Merciful and Compassionate, to behold the extremity of this lone man's agony.

Around the scaffold the men of two British regiments stood in hollow square, lean, hard fellows, with bronzed, bearded faces, clad in appro

priate scarlet uniforms, with shakos on their heads, and with nothing better than linen curtains hanging about their ears to protect them from the fierce rays of an Indian sun. Behind them a multi-colored mob of natives was gathered, Hindus, Muhammadans, men of many castes and creeds, dressed in all descriptions of costumes, from loosely flowing draperies to loin-clouts, silent, awed, sullen, scowling, but instinct with a horrible eagerness. The eyes of white men and brown men alike were fixed upon one thing-the figure upon the scaffold. The soldiers' faces wore a number of varying expressions-some gazed with an indifference born of familiarity with what was going forward; some looked away from time to time, as though loth to watch longer the sufferings of that tortured man, but a terrible fascination drew their eyes back, again and again, to the spectacle of terror; in the faces of a few there was a jeering triumph, in those of others there was a stern delight; in none could pity be discerned, though one or two of the younger men trembled and shook, sickened by a weakness which they strove to conceal, and of which they were mightly ashamed.

"Allah!. . . Allah! . . . Al . . . lah!" A third time that cry of man to his Maker rang out shattering the stillness, and a kind of tremulous wave, accompanied by a dull, barely audible murmur, swept over the mob of native spectators.

The man who uttered that strenuous outcry stood high above the ground on the platform of the rude scaffold. His arms were tied behind his back, and ropes had been bound about his chest. His legs were made fast by stout cords securely knotted above the knees and about the ankles. He stood there, pinioned and fettered, his whole body rigid and immovable. Only the head, with that awful face up-turned

towards the Heaven upon which its owner cried, was free.

The condemned man was clad in the flowing garments of the Muhammadan, garments which had once been white, but which were now crumpled and foul. The knees and elbows were stained red, and his beard was soiled with clots of human blood, for, in accordance with the sentence passed in that terrible hour of barbarous vengeance, he had been forced to lick clean with his tongue one square-foot of the pavement in that place of murder and death. The back of his coat, where it stood out against his shoulder-blades, which the ropes drew into prominence, or where it fell slack between them, was spotted with streaks and dots of the same color, for this pure bred Muhammadan had been savagely scourged by Sweepers, low-caste folk, whose very touch is a defilement.

His tense face was ashen-gray-that hideous tint to which brown skins alone

can blanch under the stress of mighty emotion-and the ghastliness of its hue was enhanced by contrast with the ragged fringe of black beard which framed those pallid features. The eyes, starting from their sockets, were strained upward to the unpitying heavens; the pale lips were drawn back, as in a snarl, exposing livid gums, and teeth that ground loudly against each other; deep lines of agony seamed his face.

Yet, in the eyes of this doomed wretch, the death that awaited him was as nothing. He was mad with terror, stricken wild with despair; but it was not the fear of death that tortured him, not despair, born of a knowledge of the inexorable hatred of his foes, that stretched him there, in the gaze of all men, as upon an invisible rack. His terror was of the eternal damnation that surely awaited him beyond the awful Bourne, despair of salvation, since that is denied to those

who go to their death thus outrageously defiled, whose very bodies are doomed to be reduced to ashes and scattered to the four winds, past the power of human or angelic gathering.

“Allah! . . . Allah! . . . Al . . . lah!” Once more that terrible outcry split the silence, and now it was followed by a gush of fierce words, words that stumbled over one another in the impetuous torrent of their outflow, words spoken by one who knew that his time was short, words that sent a thrill like a cold shudder passing over the sea of up-turned brown faces that spread away from the scaffold to the ruined walls of Cawnpúr. "Brothers, my brothers, I die! I, Mir Abdullah! These dogs have defiled my body.. my corpse they will burn with fire . . . they will strew mine ashes on the ground . . . and the Res

...

urrection, the awful Kiamah, the Last Great Day of all, shall not find Mir Abdullah among the tale of the Sons of the Faith! . . . Hear me, oh my brothers! Hear this, the cry of Mir Abdullah who dieth now before your eyes, and dieth body and soul!" The stream of passionate words, broken at first by gasps and sobs-hard sobs that brought with them no gentle relief of tearsflowed now in fierce spate from the lips of that ghastly figure, which stood high above the heads of the listening throng, its body rigid, the very incarnation of agony, its livid face still straining towards the Heaven which man in his malice had denied him. “A legacy!" he cried. "A legacy I leave to my son -my little son Mir Akhbar! Ye who listen to my words go forth, I bid you, go forth from this place of sin, and bear the tidings of what hath befallen me to the widow woman who will mourn for me in Delhi City, in the alley by the Jumna Musjid! Tell her of the doings of these dog-folk, tell to her how, robbed of salvation by the foul defilements of my body, my soul went

forth shrieking to Naraka, and calling upon Allah to pity and avenge! Bid her breed the boy, my son, so that in the appointed hour he, propelled by the finger of Allah, may accomplish that vengeance! Bid her train him with a hatred of these dog-folk in his heart, with curses of them upon his lips! Bid her teach him to pray for their destruction at each bowing down, aye from the Fajr to the Isa! Bid her train him till his hand is cunning with the weapons that slay! Bid her instil but a single idea, a single duty into his mind -the idea of vengeance, the duty of taking the life of the man who hath dishonored and slain his father! Brothers, I had nought to do with the killing that went forward in that place of death! Am I, Mir Abdullah, a paid butcher that I should sully my hand with such work as that? But for a crime in which I had no share, here die I body and soul! Oh, my brothers, bear to my son full tidings of this thing. He is very little, but presently he will know and understand! And above all other names let him cherish and remember the name of Bari Sahib, the war chief, who hath condemned me to the double death!"

"What's the old beggar jawing about?" asked the officer in charge of the execution party of a young civilian who stood near him to the right of the scaffold.

"I can't quite make out," was the answer. "He's talking so infernally fast that it's difficult to follow him, but it's something about a son of his who is apparently in Delhi, and I think he says that he's innocent, but they all say that."

"Yes, damn them," said the officer. "Hadn't we better get to work, eh?" "I should think so," said the civilian. "There are a dozen others to be slung up before noon."

"I charge you, brothers, to bear these my words to the widow and to my man

"Slip the bolt, Bill," growled the sergeant to the hangman in obedience to a word from his officer.

"Allah! . . . Al . . ."

The trap-doors fell inward suddenly; the rigid figure which they had supported dropped like a bolt, was arrested with a mighty jerk, shuddered, just as a steam-launch shudders when an unseen rock brings it to an abrupt standstill from racing at full-speed, was convulsed for an instant by quick, short spasms, and then swung slowly to and fro at the end of the rope. The head was canted over the left shoulder, but the blackened face was still fixed upon the skies, the swollen tongue lolling out as though in derision of the heaven that had been denied to the passing soul.

A sound like a groan ran through the mob of natives, and some one on the outskirts of the crowd screamed shrilly, calling, as the dead man had done, upon The Pilot

the name of Allah and his Prophet. The soldiers well used to their work, began to make the engine of vengeance ready for its next victim. A kite, high up in the heavens, hovered with motionless wings, scenting the carrion which it dared not approach.

In the scanty shade of the parched trees, which flanked the parade-ground on the right, a Muhammadan mendicant sat cross-legged in seeming contemplation. He was hideous to look at, his hair long and in matted ratstails hung about his shoulders and over his breast, he was dressed in tattered garments, and his body was wasted by much fasting, and filthy as only that of an unclean Oriental can be. His lips moved perpetually though no sound came from them. The rest of his body was still, rigidly still, only as the drop fell, over there at the scaffold, his fingers twisted a string which he held like a rosary, into a big, hard knot. The cord was already marked in this manner in more than a dozen places, but the knot which the holy man's fingers now fashioned, though his eyes never glanced at it, was double the size of those that had preceded it.

Hugh Clifford.

Joseph Conrad's new romance "Nostromo," now appearing as a serial in England, has its scene laid in South America.

The completed work which Henry Seton Merriman left consists of a volume of stories and a new novel. The former will be published this spring under the title "Other Stories," and the

novel, "The Last Hope," which is of the time of Napoleon III., will be published in the early autumn after it has run its serial course in the Illustrated London News.

The Academy thinks that the literary history of 1903 was particularly distinguished for biographies. It mentions among them the blographies or

autobiographies of Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, Dr. Guinness Rogers, Lord Wolseley, Lord Gough, W. W. Story, Voltaire, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, Galileo, Daniel O'Connell, J. C. Horsley, R.A., Sir Francis Cowley Burnand, Charles Reade, Thackeray, Fanny Burney, Crabbe, Queen Victoria, Robert Buchanan, and several others; large and small, a varied and a goodly list.

The London Publishers' Circular prints a summary of the publications of 1903 in England, which shows a total, including new books and new editions, of 8,381 items, which is exactly a thousand above the previous year. Much of this gain, if it is a gain, is due to pamphlets. Theology (702) has notably increased, and so have educational books (748), though arts and sciences and law are not so well represented. The section of juvenile works and novels exceeds the last record, and is, as usual, by far the largest (2,650). Weary reviewers will not be surprised to see that the new books alone in this line reached in October 296, and in November 347, the new editions in each of these months being over a hundred.

The seventh volume of the documentary history of The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, is taken up with the events of the important four years 1588-91. These years marked a stage in the history of the islands, for the "Audiencia" gave place to a royal governor, who was sent out with instructions to reform abuses. The history of three centuries later was curiously anticipated, for there were conspiracies of the natives against the Spaniards, which

were savagely repressed, and the question of Chinese immigration was already a threatening one. There was also continuing friction between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and the energetic and somewhat arrogant figure of Bishop Salazar held the centre of the stage. The documents translated, which are of quaint interest, are made intelligible by the notes and preface of the editors. The Arthur H. Clark Company.

The Arthur H. Clark Company of Cleveland, for whom formidable literary undertakings appear to possess a peculiar charm, announce under the general title "Early Western Travels" a series of annotated reprints of some of the best and rarest contemporary volumes of travel, covering the period from 1748 to 1846, and descriptive of the aborigines and social and economic conditions in the middle and far West, during the years of early American settlement. The series will be edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, the editor of "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents," etc., and will contain facsimiles of the original title-pages, maps, portraits, views, etc. There will be thirtyone volumes, the first one containing selections from the letters and journals of Conrad Weiser, George Croghan, Charles Frederick Post, and Captain Thomas Morris. The edition is limited to 750 complete sets; and readers who are acquainted with the documentary history of The Philippine Islands, which the same house is publishing, will feel confident regarding the attractive and substantial form of presentation of the new series.