dreds of bicyclists, men and women of irreproachable taste, are busy designing something that will be better, and the fashionable tailors are losing sleep in the quest for some successful design. The bicycle world awaits with an ovation the man of genius who will suggest a costume at once simple, elegant, appropriate, comfortable, and, last but not least, not yet worn everywhere.

In the meantime the world outside of fashion's domain is not so particular. In order to complete this little account of the bicyclemania in Paris, I must say a word about the excellent people whom one meets by the thousand upon every fair day-mostly men in some sort of improvised costume, with ordinary trousers fastened at the bottom with steel clasps; they are probably tradespeople coming and going from their shops and counting-houses, pedalling along with energy and enthusiasm, and highly indifferent to the call for an unique bicycle costume.

I have used the expression bicyclemania, and in view of the facts, is it anything short of that? No class of

the community is free from the passion, the workers as well as the butterflies. The workers find the exercise helpful. Thus, such painters as Béraud and Roll were among the first to take it up. Most convincing fact of all, the bicycle has invaded the theatre, the court

of last appeal in Paris. Not only our stage celebrities have taken to the wheel by the score, but in a recent piece by Jules Lemaître, produced at the Gymnase Theatre, the chief personages made their first entry upon bicycles.

Coquelin, the younger, is now at work upon a monologue which he proposes to recite from end to end while awheel and working his pedals. Bicycle business," feats of riding, bellringing, and whistle-blowing will vary the recital, at the last words of which bicycle and rider will disappear in the wings.

6.

VOL. XVIII-21

THE STREET OF VICE

T

HE Reverend Justinian Littlefield, Rector of Trinity, Millbrook, having finished a longdeferred list of parochial calls, hurried homeward in the gathering gloom of the autumnal twilight; a shower was impending and a high wind came before the rain. The reverend gentleman cherished a deep hostility to all dirt and all schismatics. Dirt, he was accustomed to say, is merely matter out of place; and schismatics are wrong-headed people who insist on calling themselves Christians; whereas they are worldly people out of place. Dirt, by scrupulous care, may be avoided. Heretical and disputatious persons, who refuse to accept as final the dogma of the apostolic succession, are among the inevitable evils of society, to be shunned if one would preserve serenity of temper and charity of judgment. Just now, the rector was intent on getting home before the whirling dust should soil his well-nourished and spotless person. He had great respect for his cloth.

Millbrook is a manufacturing town in which new-fangled mills and their operatives are still struggling with the ancient order of things, when an eminent respectability that verged on aristocracy guarded with mild dignity the interests of the community. The aristocrats are dying out and the newly rich, sons of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water for a former generation, are crowding into the best streets, living in the best houses. The Reverend Doctor Justinian Littlefield viewed these changes with undisguised dismay. It irked him to see his parish gradually

transformed, the prosperous mill men and their numerous progeny taking the places of the fine old families whose day was done, and whose sap had apparently sunk into the ground. That Browns and Whites and Greens should occupy the stately mansions built for the Livingstons, Athertons, and Barnwells was to him a mysterious dispensation of Providence. He accepted the new conditions with inward protest, and with an insolent condescension that irritated the self-love of the newly rich, whose names suggest the colors which their mills wove into fabrics. But, as far as he was able, he avoided the streets and avenues chiefly frequented by the substratum of the new society-the operatives and their swarming broods. So on this threatening autumn eve the good man reluctantly took Red Lane on his homeward way.

The rectory, with its handsome portico and trim gardens, faced Elm Avenue, and its nearest neighbors were the even handsomer homes of Judge Nelson and General Hutchinson. The trim garden smiled genteelly on the avenue; but behind the rectory it sloped steeply down to a retaining wall of stone that closed one end of Red Lane, making it a blind alley. When the village gossips illustrated their talk with the figure of speech, "butting your head against a stone wall," George Barnwell always thought of the rectory wall that closed the end of Red Lane

it was so relentless in its stoniness. To night, in the deepening twilight, the worthy Rector, afraid of being caught out in a shower, and more afraid of meeting the dust-clouds of the broad avenue, took a short cut homeward, braving the repulsiveness of Red Lane that he might thereby gain the steps in the retaining wall, and so reach the rectory by the shortest way.

The Reverend Justinian Littlefield,

contemplating Red Lane from his vineclad and eminently dignified portico above, had marked with discomfort the gradual accretion of rum-shops, billiard-rooms, and other places of dissolute resort, so far below him. These grew and multiplied with the increase of mills and the consequent inflow of an alien population. Although there was less viciousness in Red Lane than the Rector imagined, he had come to regard it as a very den of vice, an habitation of cruelty. And from his loftiness on the floral heights above, he had named this the Street of Vice. Now, with a sense of having taken his life into his own hands, he plunged into the crepuscular dimness of the blind alley, on his way by a short cut to the rectory. Perhaps his trepidation was childish; but it was not unnatural, for the Rector was a timorous man, and he was glad when his footsteps resounded on the loose planks of the bridge that spanned the ravine which cuts Red Lane in twain. The bridge was more than half-way between the evil entrance to the Street of Vice and the rectory wall. He was nearly home.

An uncommonly fierce blast came roaring up the ravine, carrying clouds of yellow dust and striking the Rector full on the crown, blinding his eyes and flapping the wide rim of his apostolic hat exasperatingly over his face. Just then he was startled by the sudden impact of a person on his left side. With the ready instinct of self-defence he struck out in the dusty and stormy twilight, and his hand rudely smote full in the face of a man. He heard what seemed a smothered oath and a saying which he could not understand. He was rapped sharply on the head; a pair of stalwart hands grasped him firmly by the collar of his sacerdotal coat; he felt himself lifted in the air and whirling in the eddying gust, striking the low rail of the bridge, then falling, falling, he knew not whither; he heard a crashing sound at the back of his head, not painful but odd and unusual. Then all was still, and the good Rector, flat on his back among the stones in the bottom of the ravine, lapsed into unconsciousness that resembled death more than sleep.

GEORGE BARNWELL

He was the handsomest man in Millbrook; and his beauty, his generous ways, and his gay humor made him so general a favorite with the good fellows of the village, to say nothing of the factory girls and the coy maidens of the aristocracy, that he was in a fair way to be spoiled. Now that I come to think of it, he was already spoiled. Perhaps if his father, Senior Warden and upright Judge that he was, had been less stern with his son, George Barnwell might have been restrained from the error of his ways. While his mother lived, the lad had gone to her with his cares and troubles, and had been comforted and soothed as well as warned and guided. But, bereft of her, the motherless boy could not bring himself to face his father with confessions and prayers for help. The wayward son could not be won by the rigid and frigid code of morals that underlaid the discipline of the Judge's family government.

Admiring and congenial companions were usually waiting for George Barnwell in the unsavory haunts of Red Lane. When he came home on his college vacations, he was noisily welcomed in resorts that Judge Barnwell knew not of, and whose existence in Millbrook, fine old Millbrook, was unsuspected by him. To-night, on the point of leaving for the fall term, George was having "a good time with some of his evil mates, drinking, joking, and story-telling in a low-ceiled, noisy, and ill-flavored rum-shop, the Burnt Rag, one of the least disreputable of the dens with which Red Lane was infested.

A thin-faced, wild eyed operative from the print-works, a professed anarchist and a rude-talking fellow, took up his glass of liquor from the sloppy bar, as he was drinking with George Barnwell's companions, though not of them. The others had toasted George and had wished him a speedy return to Millbrook. The sneering son of anarchy lifted high his glass and cried "Down with the courts and damn the Judge!"

George, flushed with anger, threw away his glass, and, seizing the little agitator by the scruff of his neck, tossed him into a corner; then, after sparring confusedly in the midst of a knot of the anarchist's sympathizers, he threw a banknote on the bar and rushed from the place. This was an unexpected and sorry farewell to Millbrook, he thought, as he fled from the riot behind him. The wildness of the dying day and the tumult of the sky were in consonance with the rage that suddenly sprang up within his heart.

Plunging into the dusty twilight, he ran against a man who seemed to approach obliquely on his right, and who struck him lightly but firmly full in the face. Fancying that the wild-eyed anarchist and his friends had pursued him, George Barnwell, with an imprecation and a threat, lifted his antagonist by the collar and flung him from him into the gathering darkness, losing his hat and stick as he threw the man, with tremendous strength, into the void. Stooping to pick up his hat, he was again attacked, as if by a halfdozen foes, and in the belief that the whole pack was upon him, he set his arms in motion like a wind-mill, or a farmer's flail, and with savage joy he thought he heard the fall of many a victim as he rained his blows indiscriminately in the gloom. Suddenly he was left alone, and, wiping the perspiration from his forehead, his muscles tremulous with excitement and strain, he took his way homeward, cursing as he

went.

THE IDLE APPRENTICE

As the Burnt Rag was the least vile of all the ill resorts in Red Lane, so the Rialto was the lowest and most noisome. It was there that the burglary of the Wendover Mills was planned; and when Danny Rafferty was tried for the murder of the mill watchman, which took place on the night of the robbery, the character of the place was so fully brought out in the testimony of witnesses that the excise officers were compelled, in deference to an excited public opinion, to take away the license of the keeper of the den.

Now, however, a year having elapsed since this exposure, public opinion had had its attention drawn to other things, and while the comparative merits of the trolley and horse-power, as applied to street-car traffic, were engaging the thoughts of the law makers of the town, the Rialto was in full blast. On this evening, Jack Dunning, a strapping youth of nineteen years, who had thrown up his job of learning the trade of harness-making in the neighboring town of Riverbank, stood at the bar of the Rialto shaking dice with the proprietor of that resort, several choice companions assisting with advice and occasional hands at the dice - box. When a bout with the dice was concluded, the loser in the game ordered a round of drinks for his associate gamblers; the bartender judiciously refrained from drinking, preferring cash to his own beverages. There was much wild hilarity and profanity at the expense of the loser.

Three feeble kerosene lamps shed their rays over the dark and dingy room. Rows of bottles, mostly empty, stood in front of the mirror behind the bar. A stuffed snake skin was festooned across the top of the bottledecorated looking-glass, thereby affording frequenters of the place and their host much innocent amusement when occasion offered in the appearance of a bibulous but chance customer who asked concerning the reptile. There ain't no snake, and you've got 'em ag'in," was the formula usually adopted by the jocose bartender. Jack Dunning had hurried in this answer to a stranger's inquiry, that night, greatly to the mortification and wrath of the keeper of the bar, whose favorite joke was thus anticipated.

Around the long, narrow room were ranged a few rickety tables, some of them unoccupied save for the flies that gathered about little pools of beer, and sipped eagerly at the leavings of customers who had drank and gone their way; and at other tables sat groups of coarse, hard-featured men, talking loudly and disputatiously, pounding with their beer-glasses the while; and here and there a guest, unkempt and forlorn, overcome with potations or

with the sleepiness that follows nights spent in hay-mows, or under farmer's wagons, dozed until wrenched from slumber by the angry "bouncer" of this house of entertainment, in which everything but sleep was allowed unchecked.

Jack Dunning, who was only just beginning his career of idleness and dissoluteness, occasionally turned and regarded the scene with repulsion and disgust. He watched the avaricious look of the bartender as the dice rolled out their tale of loss and gain on the counter. He noted that the liquor was oftener paid for by the gamblers than drank at the expense of the house; and he was sore over the discovery that no man paid for the vile stuff so many times as Jack Dunning paid. He was playing a losing game; and he had no more money in his pocket, although, with a gambler's desperation, he still played on.

The good-looking and rosy face of Jack was white with rage when, the suave bartender, having hurriedly brushed the dice aside, said, "Well, gents, what shall it be? Jack's lost ag'in, as usual.”

"You lie, you scamp! You lie!" shouted Jack. "I threw fives and you threw three threes, a deuce, and an ace." For reply, the bartender sprung over the counter, but before he could grab Jack Dunning, that worthy young man was hustled by his friends toward the door, Sim Ray whispering in his ear, hoarsely, "Let him alone, you fool, he carries a knife under his vest! Get out quick!"

So saying, Simeon ran Jack out of the dive into the street, but from the hurly-burly and confusion within, it seemed to the angry apprentice that he was pursued by a yet more angry man who carried a knife.

In this belief, encountering a blinding storm of dust and wind, he stumbled upon some one who in the darkness punched him in the face with an upward motion of his elbow. For a moment it seemed to Jack as if he were surrounded by a dozen men, all struggling to get at him, although not a word was spoken. With a wild sweep of his arms in the obscurity he felt free

dom around him, as if he had laid his assailants low in the dust. Turning to fly from the place, his foot struck some object; he stooped and picked up a hat and a short bludgeon, dropped in the confusion of the mêlée.

"I've lost my hat, and this stick may be needed if the hounds chase me across the field," was the thought that flashed through Jack's mind as he dashed out of Red Lane, down a side street, through a stable-yard, over a fence, and so through the short brown grass of Stimpson's field.

The sight of a man racing across a field, carrying a hat in one hand and a thick stick in another, would have roused the suspicions of any observer; but the darkening skies shut out the light, and in the dusky twilight Jack Dunning might have escaped unseen. As he ran, the five-forty-five train from Millbrook for Riverbank was gathering speed; it had just left the station, and Mike Redmond, the alert young brakeman, standing at his post on the rear platform of the last car, leaning forward and grasping the hand-rail, noted the flying, hatless figure as it rushed through the grass in a direction oblique to the moving train. Mike watched with interest the fleetness of the man, and when Jack Dunning, breathless and still hatless, snatched at the handrail of the car and swung lightly up to the step so difficult to reach from the ground, Mike gave him a lift and said, "That's a close call for you, young feller."

"And I'm well out of that hole," was Jack's reply, as he put the hat on his head and flung the bludgeon out into the grass now beaten down with the falling rain and swirling wind. But whether Jack referred to the village from which he had run, or to the wet and boggy field through which he had fled, Mike could never tell. Later, when the engine was whistling at the crossing on the edge of Wakefield's Meadows, Mike Redmond, looking through the rear window of the car, saw Jack take off his hat, which seemed too small for his round head, covered with a thick growth of red hair, look curiously into the lining where two gilt letters marked the owner's name, tear out the silk with a smile and toss