"That is so."

"And if he does not do so, you equally threaten to blow him up?"

Quite so.

You have it to a T."

"Now, sir, let me ask you if that is not illogical ?"

"Illogical! Not a bit of it. Bless ye, the second blowing-up is only a threat—the assassination of a Premier is one of those commodities of Hope, which, I told you, are the speciality of our firm. It is the first blowing-up that would be genuine; and we are glad, as I said before, to avoid the necessity, from the danger of our motives being misunderstood."

"Thank you,” said Jack, "for your polite explanation, and now I should like to terminate the interview."

"Ye seem in a hurry to go,” replied the Captain. "Well, I will not detain you. Drop in here any time you feel inclinedwhistle 'Auld lang syne,' and you shall be admitted. Sorry I haven't a card about me, but it reads 'Frederick Langley St. Clair, M.A., Practical Mechanician.' Charming our knowledge of each other, isn't it, recalls the days of Jonathan Wild, doesn't it? You don't invite me in return, I see. Delicacy that fears a refusal, I suppose. Of course, ye are aware that should you break the oath (though, I belave, as gintlemen, we can rely on each other without fear) it is impossible to escape our Organisation, whose networks ramify through England. Sooner or later ye will be hoist with the Irish petard." He touched a springa rocky door flew open, above the archway through which Jack had crawled.

The painter gave a last look around the cave-he saw the platform, the two black bags, the pile of wheelwork, the candles, the innocent little girls, the quaint dome-like roof, and the grotesque natural carvings on the walls, the damp floor, with here and there a glossy brown strip of seaweed, the Captain's arm-chair, and the gentlemanly-dressed figures of the gang, some seated on stools and some on projecting bits of cliff; all their faces radiant, but the pock-marked countenance of Murphy, who was vulgarised by his red scarf, beaming with especial complacency. He waved a polite adieu to his hosts, and the door closed behind him and the Captain, shutting out what he was to see how often in fevered visions of the night.

The dynamiter and his whilom intended victim wound their way along narrow passages till they reached the spot which Jack remembered to have knelt in years ago. Here he observed his once smart straw hat, now muddy, trampled upon, and battered. He picked it up ruefully, reflecting on all he had gone through for its sake and asking why, since he was to brave peril like a knight of old, it was not given to him to do so for a more glorious object, say, for the sake of a fair lady; and also whether when the Ideal was finally, after infinite suffering, rescued from the depths of materialism, it would bear equally indelible traces of its fall.

The Captain whistled. Two answering notes were heard. He

Ꮓ

pressed another spring, a whirring sound followed and the cliff shot open. He touched a third spring and it remained yawning. Jack stepped out into the bright, fresh air-the last sight he saw was the Captain waving the bloody document with malicious glee, and, as the rock closed, he heard the mocking ring of his sardonic laughter.

But the laughter did not last long. Scarcely had Jack, conscious of being curiously scrutinised by a stout gentleman who was resting on his oars near the shore, turned the bend in the cliff, intending to walk to Broadstairs, when a slim, elegant young man with white teeth and a beautiful blond moustache burst into the cave. He was astonished to hear the passages echoing with joyful exclamations, snatches of song and bursts of Homeric laughter.

66 What, Jim !" was the unanimous cry as the door above the archway swung open.

"You're divilish late, Jim!” cried the Captain. “But I haven't the heart to scold ye, or to keep ye out of your salary. Here's your fifty. We're off to fresh woods and explosions new.”

Jim with a bewildered air took the money, which he buttoned up in an inner breast-pocket beside his revolver. Then he exclaimed: "I've had such an adventure, boys, such a lovely creature too. Her boat smashed on that reef to the left, and a middle-aged gent, who was with her, had to carry her over the rocks. Quiet chap he was, looking half-asleep, and the very picture of misery. When I saw what a splendid cargo he was carrying-none of your dd creamy babies, but a dark-eyed brunette full of fire and passion-thinks I, 'I can do the chivalrous with profit here.' In a word I went to meet her and relieved the gent. As I was carrying her, as slowly as I could, for it was a ticklish situation, ha ha ha! half my pleasure was spoilt by my brain worrying about her companion. I was sure I knew his phiz well, and he looked a bit like a hunted conspirator. He sat down on the sands, and I kept looking at him, but for the life of me I couldn't remember. All at once his hat blew off, and he ran after it, and then I knew him by this week's caricature in Punch of Floppington running away from his old opinions. Captain, if you had seen him you'd have sworn, as I did, that he was the Premier." The gang broke into a roar of enjoyment, and winked suggestively at one another.

return, but a I saw the girl spoke to her.

"Well," proceeded Jim, "I waited for him to quarter of an hour passed without sight of him. ready to cry, and, anxious to find out the truth, I She called her lover-for such she said he was-a brute, and said he'd run away on purpose. I offered to see her back to Ramsgate where she was staying. She consented. I went, and returned as quickly as I could; but I've got her London address which I mean to keep to myself, unless the Captain

"Well, and the lover?" interposed the Captain with a knowing grin

"Oh, I made a mistake, that was all. The girl's name is Eliza Bathbrill, and his name is Jack Dawe. He is a house-and-sign painter, and the girl told me, proudly, that he was said to resemble the Premier. I saw the old woman-his mother—a fat, old widow lady, full of queer sayings, who keeps a cook-shop in the Bethnal Green Road, London; and left her, mad with anxiety, as to what had become of her only son. Fancy a Premier living in a cookshop! Ha ha! ha! But what's the matter with you all?”

For the Captain had turned livid, and his speech was momentarily paralysed, while a look of dismay spread over the faces of all

the gang.

'What in the

do you mean, d- you ?" he cried as soon as he could speak. "It was the Premier!"

Hullo, what's up, Captain?

How could it be the Premier?” The young man took out his watch, "Don't you know-I'd forgotten it myself for the moment, of course-that at the present moment the Premier is laying the foundation-stone of the Eno Hospital for dyspeptics, a hundred miles off?”

true.

The gang broke into a roar of disappointment. It was too

"Scoundhrels, divils, rogues!" cried the Captain, mad with rage. Give me back that money!"

A low, fierce cry of determined dissent warned him not to arouse any further the wild-beast instincts of his men. It was a dangerous topic.

The Captain flung himself into his arm-chair with a crash. "Duped by a house-painter !" he shrieked, convulsively crumpling up the bloody document. "With my own helptricked, baffled, betrayed I'

Book DL.

CHAPTER I.

A MAN'S HEART.

HE Dog Days were come, and without the permission of the almanacs. Before them, loosed (unmuzzled) from the kennels of the Year, what mortal could stand? Now set in the glacial epoch of culinary chronology; now the City gentleman fanned his brow with the penny Japanese fan, and dreamed of hammocks and houris; now the prosperous bourgeois pored o'er his Bradshaw and consulted with the wife of his bosom.

The sun was too much with and for the emasculated men of that age, and they might have been excused for echoing an old complaint of Mrs. Dawe's, that it would have been better for him to reserve his energies for the winter, when they were more needed. It was not merely the discomfort occasioned by the warmth of his attentions that the old lady grumbled at. Her great grievance was the impossibility of getting the due quantum of work out of the machinery which constituted herself and Sally. Work, indeed! Nature would have none of it but her own. She invited you to lounge in the shadow of sun-glinted leafage, to part the glassy wave, to watch in delicious drowsiness the white cliffs and clouds sailing past you as in a dream, to land the leaping salmon, to organise the laughing picnic. She offered you rich largess of sunny air, and golden sky, and cool, clear water, and verdurous arcade. At your peril reject the offerings of the gods!

Work Sturdy Scotsmen lay prostrate 'neath Apollo's glittering shafts, unable to move hand or foot, though their banking accounts depended on it; German Gelehrten snored in their library chairs; French philosophers moderated the warmth of their rhetoric; and Irish insurgents drank more and said less. Even the British Pavior occasionally paused in his task.

But amid the universal supineness there was left one body of men, whom nor heat nor cold could daunt; one corps of the army of humanity to show to the world that the ancient traditions of England were not a dream; one house of Hellenic heroes, blind to the witching splendours of sea and sky, and to all but the page of Duty, and deaf save to the call of Glory. Spartans, fighting under the shadow of their own speeches, heavy, sun-darkening, they alone trembled not before the mighty Sovereign of the Orient. In their ancestral parks the deer drank in the ambrosial air with proud swelling nostrils, and tossed their antlers skywards; the butterflies flitted lazily; the fish leaped in the sunny streams; the flowers and birds filled the air with perfume and song, and all the young world rejoiced in its strength. But they, "the masters of things," impelled by motives understanded not of the baser creation, under the sway of ethical imperatives unknown to the animal world, sat on benches and made articulate and inarticulate noises.

Noble Six Hundred !

At their head, the great Floppington worked like a modern Herakles. Ever at his post in the House when his presence was necessary, he showed himself as cunning in debate as in pure oratory. Triumph trod on the heels of triumph! The masterly vigour of his rhetoric, the largeness of his views, the clearness of his expositions, the trenchancy of his sarcasm, which disdained not the idioms of the people, enshrined every speech, as soon as made, among the classics of oratory. Almost entirely abandoning the jejune and puerile pseudo-poeticism of his earlier efforts, the Minister seemed at last to have found his right manner; vague splendour of metaphor was exchanged for lucidity, and barren spiritual and emotional appeals gave place to facts and figures.

It was not surprising, then, that the Premier's popularity showed no signs of falling from the height to which it had so unexpectedly attained. On the contrary, it went on steadily rising, every byelection going steadily in his favour. The gratitude of the masses for what he had already done, and their lively expectation of future favours, sowed the seeds of quite a novel affection for him which was fostered by the pertinacious activity with which he kept his promises before their eyes.

The philosophical historian, however, must needs direct attention to another cause, whose action upon himself no one would, probably, have confessed. The paradoxical world loves equally to find its heroes divine or human; with the proviso, in the latter case, that the humanity is not glaringly obtruded, but remains in shadow, lending a delicious vagueness to the picture. The alleged galanterie of the Premier interested the people; and between notoriety and popularity, as between genius and insanity, the partition is slight. Only the pen of a Tacitus could do adequate justice to this part of the subject.

But whatever the reason of the fact, it is certain that never had Prime Minister been more popular in the House or out of it; and