working. By the side of this trap-door was another tiny one through which the ladder was reached; this had to be closed after him by anyone going down or coming up.

There was about twenty feet of water in the shaft, the still surface looking, by the steady, sullen light of the candle which the manager deftly stuck in a lump of clay he took from his pocket, as if it were a surface of some smooth black unknown softness in which the falling drops knocked little holes that filled up mockingly.

"Here you are; you can sit on this piece of 3 x 2," he said, taking a small piece of wood from the scaffolding of the runners. "Put it across from a rung of the ladder to that niche in the wall." He pulled a piece of wire that ran all down the shaft, and presently a far off rumbling grew and grew; the bucket came noisily down, and, smashing into the water, rolled to one side.

"Catch it by the handle-that's right -steer it on to the runners-they'll only allow you a few seconds-now she's moving"; and ghostlike the bucket arose from the blackness and glided up and up till it was out of sight.

"Got another candle in case that one goes out or falls into the water?" "Yes."

Then the manager climbed up and disappeared as the bucket came careering down again.

He was alone in the bowels of the earth. Looking around he saw that the walls were of a yellowish brown color. They did not look hard, yet there was no timber anywhere supporting them. He rapped the wall near him with his knuckles, and felt more satisfied-it was hard enough to the touch. Still, a roof always has more the appearance of a likelihood of falling down than a wall has of falling in, and what is called the hanging wall looked, to the lonely young worker,

like a roof of very doubtful security; it looked flaky, chunky, disconnected, not solid. He became aware, now that he was alone, that drips of water were quickly permeating his thin coat, and making little scarce-heard noises on his cap. Down came the bucket. As he leaned over the water to drag it into its place, he saw what would happen if he did not get it there in time. The edge of the bucket would catch in the stout cross-piece of the scaffolding, and the horse would tug, and jerk, and strain until the rope would break, wherever it happened to be weakestthe bucket would sink like lightning to the bottom of the shaft, and the thick wire rope would come from the break, twisting and coiling like an angry python. He would be utterly defenceless, and without escape; perhaps he would raise an impotent arm, and give one cry; perhaps he would be able to sit still and take his death or mangling as he believed some men did.

For an hour or more all went well. He gathered confidence from his repeated success in handling the bucket. He was soaked to the skin, but the water was not very cold. He began to sing, and found that his voice took unto itself a glory that it had never possessed before: he even seemed to himself to be singing in tune, a thing which he knew he had never accomplished previously. Presently there came a voice from the 100 feet level. "Below there!"

"Hullo!" said the singer. "We're going to fire. I've stopped your bucket with the communicator here must shut you in for a bit. You seem pretty jolly down there?"

"Oh, I'm all right, thank you."

"Well, there'll be five shots, and then I'll come and open the door againyou're all right, eh?"

"Go ahead!" and clank fell the trapdoor. Then came the cry "Fire! Fire!" in long drawn-out, warning shouts, and

two, three pairs of feet rattled, running over the iron door. What was coming? And how would it affect him, shut in his sloping tunnel? He turned to the candle for consolation: it was burning sulkily, and spluttering a little, for a tiny drop of water had fallen on the edge of it. He stretched out his hand to reach it, and look for a fresh place to put it in. As he did so there was a hiss, and a palpable black softness clung to his face and blinded him. It was the darkness. He heard the candle flop maliciously with a single chuckle into the water. A large drip had changed its startingpoint, and had not only extinguished the candle but knocked it off its balance into the water.

For a moment, age-long, he did not dare to stir; it was as if he were buried alive in some soft black soil, and movement would let in the whole horror of it. Then his senses returned; he put out his hand, and touched the wall close to him. It was as though he had pressed the electric button for his own execution. The jeer of the diving candle, and the terrible darkness, had banished from his mind the closing of the trap-door, and the warning cry of fire.

As he touched the wall the shaft was filled with a smothered but tremendous roar; the vibration quivered through his body, and the darkness crinkled up and down his face. The invisible walls of his prison must be shaking; if only he could see how much! The almost two hundred feet of rock between him and the glorious sunlight that he had been so eager to get away from must surely fall, and crush him flatter than a sheet of notepaper. Would he feel it? Yes! There must be a moment of feeling as the life was ground out of him. He put his hands up to shelter his head. It was the same impotent movement that he had imagined himself making when he

had pictured the breaking of the wire rope. His half delirious laugh at this recollection was choked to soundlessness by the concussion of the second blast. He cowered lower, and stopped his ears with his fingers, as his head quivered to the third and fourth blasts. that came almost together.

Light! Light! He must have light, or something in his brain would burst, and he felt that to prevent this meant. clinging to life. He groped frantically in his pockets and found the sparecandle; he felt the ends, and put the butt into his mouth, for he wanted both hands-then the matches-as he opened the box a huge drip of water fell upon it. He struck wildly at several; there came no answering light. There was another chuckling plash in the water, and a tiny end of the candle fell back from between his teeth into his mouth. He hurled the useless matches from him, and furiously spat out the fragment of candle. Then came the fifth and loudest report. The blackness in which he was buried seemed to jam together round him in palpable spasms-a tiny flake of rock fell upon his foot. Good God! was it all coming? With a mighty effort he commanded his brain, which had begun a series of biographic views of childhood and youth, to tell upon which side of him was the ladder. He forced his right arm through the blackness, and clutched a rung. The piece of wood he had been sitting on fell into the water, and he dangled by one arm -an invisible fly clinging to an invisible wall, half submerged in invisible water. Then his feet found a rung, and he began with infinite care to feel his way up the ladder; up, and up, until his head bumped against thelittle trap-door, and he heard the dull tramp of returning feet. The largedoor opened.

"Below there?" "I'm up here."

"What's the matter? Oh! I see; candle gone out, matches wet, eh?" "Yes," said the young man.

The

"Bit nasty down there in the dark, isn't it? Been there myself." miner had opened the little trap-door, and by the light of his candle gathered from the face below him that which suggested his words.

"The old man's nowhere about; you go on down, I'll follow you and fix up a regular bloomin' illumination, and give you a fresh start." He lit three pieces of candle; showed the young one how to keep an eye on the drips of water moving, guided a few buckets for him, and talked about the exceeding solidity of the walls of the shaft; then he left him with a cheery word or so. The young man sang steadily till they called to him that it was time to come up. On one of the stages of the ladder he met a man coming down to take his place, who asked him how he liked it down there? Far above him he could see a speck of sunlight, and he answered, "Oh, not so bad!"

The next morning he came early to the mouth of the shaft. He could not go down till the whistle blew, so he walked along the whip-horse track, and looked at the wire rope lying idle along the ground. There were places where it had been mended, and there were two places where it looked to him as if it wanted mending. He wished he had not come to look at it, and as he climbed laboriously down with unnecessary clutching of the rungs, the weak places of the rope were all the time before his eyes; twice he almost dropped his candle. The bucket began to work, and the weak places on the rope stayed always in his mind, and gradually they explained themselves. He had for hours deliberately imperilled the lives of two men; knowing himself unfit for the task, he had continued to land the bucket at the whim shaft. The weak places in

the rope would get weaker and weaker till one of them would break, and his life also would be placed in deadly peril.

Only the chances of his escape were infinitely less than had been those of the men below him when he was on the surface, which was quite right; quite just; the punishment for his abject moral cowardice was to be death; he was sure that the judgment had been fixed. Somebody in some faraway court of justice passed sentence upon him. "To be killed as you might have killed"-that was how it ran, and that was all of it, no time was specified. It might be to-day, to-morrow, perhaps not for a week, but it would surely be.

Meanwhile, his imagination played weird jokes upon him. The runners and cross-pieces assumed the likeness of a scaffold, and the bucket became the inevitable knife of the guillotine, which, though it passed him by as yet. was only waiting for the order to lead him out through some unknown exit to the place where the dead myriads waited. At night, in his sleep, the bucket-with long arms, squat little legs and a black bulgy face that filled in the space between the handle and the mouth-would waddle to his bunkside, and touch him on the shoulder with an iron forefinger, clanking out, "Come! follow me! follow me!" As he sprang upright in bed it would fall back into space with a frantic beckoning.

It never entered his head to try and escape, for he looked upon his doom as just, and waited for it with what calmness he could; and, indeed, there were times when the hidden terror in him gave place to an astonishing apathy; at other times a derisive mockery beset him, and again he was bolstered up with belief in his own bravery. His creed had been knocked to pieces at the top of the whim-shaft; he

was building it up again at the bottom of the whip-shaft.

As he came up the ladder at five o'clock in the evening he always met the other man going down to take his place till one o'clock in the morning. He seemed a cheerful sort of chap, and generally gave the usual miner's greeting-"Got another shift in, mate?" and the man coming up from his condemned cell for yet another look at the blue sky would answer simply, "Yes," and hurry up the remainder of his

climb. There was no third shift from one o'clock on to daylight. The boy who drove the whip-horse at night slept in his hut, but always crawled into bed so quietly that he had never .yet heard him come in.

On the fourth night he sat up in bed wildly and rubbed his eyes. The bucket had been pushing him, pushing him relentlessly down into the black water, and the black water was choking him. There was a light in the hut; the whip-boy, contrary to his custom, having lit a small candle-end stuck on the bottom of a jam tin. There was also a noise in the hut. It was the Temple Bar.

whip-boy sobbing; sobbing with choking gasps, utterly beyond control. There was fright and horror too in the noise he was putting up his arm to shut off something, and saying, “Oh, oh, oh! Don't, don't let me see!" Then he would break down again, and all the time he shivered, and tried to take off his clothes with hands that shook with a pitiful palsy.

"What is it, Jimmy?" asked the man, staring wildly from the bunk. At the sound of his voice the boy looked up, and staggering across the hut, still sobbing, threw his arms around the man and clung to him.

In gasps that seemed as if they must tear open his heaving little chest, the boy told what there was to tell.

"The rope broke-the bucket felland, oh!-smashed him-they brought him up-I saw him."

In between the boy's words the man could hear a murmuring of voices, and one or two sharp orders. The murmuring came nearer.

The other man's hut was near his.
He clung to the boy.

J. Stanley Hughes.

the trumpets of the bersaglieri, who used to pass close by the Gymnasium, used to make our eyes sparkle, and caused grammatical mistakes to multiply behind our trembling pens. Even the oldest and most bent of the professors adopted a war-like bearing, and the fat National Guards, who took three steps to one paving-stone, no longer brought a smile to our lips when we met them on the street. The excitement increased toward the end of February, when our little city, now the principal dépôt for the Cacciatori delle Alpi, began to be thronged by young émigrés of all social conditions, coming for the most part from Lombardy and Venetia. These infused into the life of our city a more ardent spirit, and gave an unwonted air to its streets, its cafés, and all those places of public reunion, where each step showed one an unknown face, and one's glance was always met by another sparkling with pride and hope. Many of these countenances, among which were destined to the honor of bronze and marble, remain as clearly imprinted on my memory as those of my most intimate friends. There were among that thousand and more of new-comers, veterans of the war of '48, and soldiers who had shared the defense of Rome; there were future artists of distinction, like Induno, Pagliano and de Albertis; there were Cairoli, Bertani, and De Cristoforis, whose Trattato della Guerra I was to read with enthusiasm at the School of Modena. But I do not recollect having heard their names at that time: their hour of glory had not yet sounded. The only name which was then upon the lips of all was that of Cosenz, whom I remember having often seen in the Piazza d'Armi before the volunteers had got their uniforms, directing their manoeuvres with a little trumpet and a black overcoat, a veritable hero of the barricades. Slight

some

and straight as a ramrod, he had the grave countenance of a philosopher, and many respectfully touched their hats to him in the street in acknowledgment of the great prowess he had shown in Venice. And I remember well how, when the grey cloak hid all apparent difference of social condition between the émigrés, it sounded strange indeed to hear the loafers say, of this and the other private,-"That man is a lawyer: that a doctor. This one is a professor and that a great nobleman." These things did more than all the addresses and "leaders" to give the uneducated an idea of the importance of the events which were then imminent, and caused our young ladies to cast sidelong glances of romantic curiosity at those coarse military cloaks;

glances with which up to that time they had certainly never favored the rank and file. Those were great days, which shine like sapphires in the crown of our most precious memories.