seen from the balcony.

He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing
out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty
chairs. There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light
searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.
Somewhere the sun had risen. In a little, Scrope heard a dropping
sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.
The battle was joined. Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his
eyes. The Major was right. This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had
the harder part of it.




THE MAN OF WHEELS.


When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been
surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his
gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before
the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks
made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the
mention in his presence of the name of Africa. But if he had done with
Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards
he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic
consequences of that desperate siege.

He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost
sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring