Its

David saw something lithe and sinuous in the child's hands, and stiffened in every limb. Paul had a skaapstikker in his grip, the green-and-yellow deathsnake that abounds in the veldt. head lay on his arm, its pin-point eyes maliciously agleam, and the child gripped it by the middle. Christina stood petrified, but the boy laughed and dandled the reptile in glee.

"Be still, Paul," said David, in a voice that was new to him-"be still; do not move."

The child looked up at him in astonishment. "Why?" he began.

"Be still," commanded David, and went over to him cautiously. The serpent's evil head was raised as he approached, and it hissed at him. Paul stood quite quiet, and David advanced his naked hand to his certain death and the delivery of his child. The reptile poised, and as David snatched at it, it struck-but on his sleeve. The next instant was a delirious vision of writhing green and yellow; there was a cry from Paul, and the snake was on the floor. David crushed it furiously with his boot.

Christina snatched the child. "Did it bite you, Paul?" she screamed. "Did it bite you?"

The boy shook his head, but David interposed in a voice of thunder.

"Of course it did!" he vociferated with blazing eyes; "what else did my dream point to? But we'll fight with God yet. Bring me the child, Chris

tina."

On the plump forearm of Paul they found two minute punctures and two tiny points of blood. David drew his knife, and the child shrieked and struggled.

"Get a hot iron, Christina," cried David, and gripped Paul with his knees.

In the morning the room was wild and grisly with blood and the smell of

burnt flesh, and David lay face downwards on the floor, writhing as the echoes of Paul's shrieks tortured his ears. But in the next room little Paul was still for ever, and all the ghastly labor was to no purpose.

I suppose there is some provision in the make of humanity for overflow grief, some limit impregnable to affliction; for when little Paul was laid beside his brother, there were still David and Christina to walk aimlessly in their empty world. Their scars were deep and they were crippled with woe, and it seemed to them they lived as paralytics live, dead in all save in their susceptibility to torture. Moreover, there was a barrier between them in David's disastrous foreknowledge, for Christina could not throw off the thought that it contained the causal elements which had robbed her of her sons. Pain had fogged her; she could not probe the matter, and sensations tyrannized over her mind. David, too, was bowed with a sense of guilt that he could not rise to throw off. All motive was buried in the kraal; and he and his wife sat apart and spent days and nights without the traffic of speech.

But Christina was seized with an idea. She woke David in the night and spoke to him tensely.

"David," she cried, gripping him by the arm-"David! We cannot live for ever. Do you hear me? Look, David, look hard! Look where you looked before. Can you see nothing for me for us, David?"

He was sitting up, and the spell of her inspiration claimed him. He opened his eyes wide and searched the barren darkness for a sign. He groped with his mind, tore at the bonds of the present.

"Do you see nothing?" whispered Christina. "Oh, David, there must be something. Look-look hard!"

For the space of a hundred seconds

they huddled on the bed, David fumbling with the trusts of destiny, Christina waiting, breathless.

"Lie down," said David at last. "You are going to die, little cousin. It is all well."

His voice was the calmest in the world.

"And you?" cried Christina; “David, and you?"

"I see nothing," he said.

"Poor David!" murmured his wife, clinging to him. "But I am sure all will yet be well, David. Have no fear, my husband.”

She murmured on in the dark, with his arm about her, and promised him death, entreated him to believe with her, and coaxed him with the bait of the grave. They were bride and groom again, they two, and slept at last in one another's arms.

In the morning all was well with Christina, and she bustled about as of old. David was still, and hoped ever, with a tired content in what should happen, a languor that forbade him from railing on fate. Together they prepared matters as for a journey.

"If the black trousers come frayed again," said Christina, "try to remember that the scissors are better than a knife. And the seeds are all in the box under our bed."

"In the box under our bed," repeated David carefully. "Yes, under the bed. I will remember."

"And this, David," holding up piles of white linen, "this is for me. You will not forget?"

"For you?" he queried, not understanding.

Blackwood's Magazine.

"Yes," she answered softly. "I will be buried in this."

He started, but recovered himself with a quivering lip.

"Of course," he answered. "I will see to it. I must be very old, Christina." She came over and kissed him on the forehead.

In the middle of the afternoon she went to bed, and he came in and sat beside her. She held his hand, and smiled at him.

"Are you dying now?" he asked at length.

"Yes," she said. "What shall I tell Trikkie and the kleintje from you?" "Tell them nothing," he said, after a pause. "It cannot be that I shall be apart from you all long. No; I am very sure of that."

She pressed his hand, and soon afterwards felt some pain. It was little, and she made no outcry. Her death was calm and not strongly distressing, and the next day David put her into the ground where her sons lay.

But, as I have made clear, he did not die till long afterwards, when he had sold his farm and come to live in the little white house in the dorp, where colors jostled each other in the garden, and fascinated children watched him go in and come out. I think the story explains that perpetual search of which his vacant eyes gave news, and the joyous alacrity of his last homecoming, and the perfect technique of his death. It all points to the conclusion, that however brave the figures, however aspiring their capers, they but respond to strings which are pulled and loosened elsewhere.

Perceval Gibbon.

The Eastern Question-that interminable Eastern Question-which has vexed Europe and threatened its peace for nearly a century-is again upon us. In one sense it has never been absent, for wherever the Turk rules the elements of danger are present. But from time to time the fires that are always smouldering break out into fierce flame, spread over one province after another, and seem on the point of involving Europe in a general conflagration.

Though it had become plain, even in the eighteenth century, that the decay of the Turkish Empire would make the territories embraced within it a scene of internal discord, and ultimately a prey to be fought for by neighboring Powers, the Eastern Question, as we know it, may be said to have begun with the insurrection of the Greeks in the second decade of last century. The battle of Navarino in 1827 decided the issue of that struggle; and the creation of an independent Greek kingdom, shortly afterwards, gave to the Christian populations in other parts of the Sultan's dominions hopes of emancipation, which have never since deserted them. The process then begun has gone on steadily. First, the Danubian Principalities, practically independent already, became legally independent; then Servia won her freedom by a long struggle, and had it formally recognized in 1829 and guaranteed in 1856. Bulgaria was erected into an autonomous State at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. Bosnia was in the same year occupied by Austria. Montenegro was enlarged, and Thessaly was added to Greece. Eastern Roumelia, also established as a principality in 1878, achieved her union with

Bulgaria in 1885. Crete, after repeated risings, virtually ceased to be Turkish in 1897. Thus the dominions of the Sultan in Europe, which, in the seventeenth century, had stretched as far north as Budapest, have now become reduced to a comparatively narrow strip of territory, running from the Adriatic to the coast of the Black Sea at Capt. Iniada, north of Constantinople.

The process whereby the regions just enumerated have been delivered has for a hundred years past been always the same; and the same causes have been everywhere at work. Misrule has provoked discontent, discontent has broken out in rebellion, rebellion has either held its ground until the Sultan's power proved unable to overcome it, or has been suppressed with massacres so horrible, that intervention by one or more of the European Powers became inevitable. Some interfered because public opinion compelled them; and the two nearest Powers have had a further motive, for the disorders gave them an excuse, which humanity approved, for extending their own borders. The process would have been more rapid-would indeed have been completed before now-but for the jealousies of the four great States which thought themselves chiefly concerned. England deemed it her interest to maintain the Turkish Empire as a safeguard for herself against Russia. France, as the protector of Roman Catholic interests in the East, was suspicious both of England and (till within the last twenty years) of Russia. Still pronounced has been, in recent days, the rivalry of Russia and Austria. But for these jealousies, the Turk would have little, if anything, to call his own

more

upon European soil. In 1878 the Treaty of San Stefano, dictated by Russia after the war which the Bul

garian massacres of 1876 had provoked, took from the Sultan, and gave to Bulgaria, nearly the whole of what we call Macedonia; and it was the action of England which then substituted for that instrument the Treaty of Berlin, whereby these regions were handed back to the Turk. By the twenty-third article of that Treaty the Sultan undertook to introduce administrative reforms: and an International Commission was appointed to draw up a scheme embodying them. The scheme was duly prepared, but no effect was ever given to it. Things remained just as bad as they had been before. Indeed, things were in one sense worse, for the miserable peasantry of Macedonia now saw on their borders a new State, inhabited by men of their own tongue and faith, but delivered from the oppressions under which they were left to groan. One may speak of the peasantry as a whole, because all the Christians suffer, all are alike anxious to rid themselves of Turkish misgovernment. But there are differences among them, and it is partly in these differences that the special difficulty of the problem lies. In most parts of Greece, almost the whole population was Christian, and whether it spoke Greek or Albanian, it was equally anxious to be free. In Crete, the Christians were, and are, in a large majority. In Servia, there were hardly any Musulmans. In Bosnia, as in Bulgaria, the Musulmans were a minority, and in Bosnia the hand of Austria was strong enough to impose order and repress the strife of faiths. In Macedonia (omitting Albania) the Christians vastly outnumber the Musulmans. But the Christians themselves divided into four races and three religious communions. The Bulgarian

are

race prevails over three-fourths of the country, from the Black Sea to the mountains west of the Vardar valley, and extends southward nearly to the Aegean and northward to the frontiers. of the principality of Bulgaria. The northwestern districts round Pristina and Novi Bazar belong to the Servian branch of the Slavonic family. These Serbs speak a language near akin to the Bulgarian, but the two races are dissimilar in character, for the Bulgarians are of Finnish origin; and, though they have been commingled with the Slavs among whom they settled in the seventh century A. D., and have learnt from them their Slavonic speech, they remain different in mind and temper. The Greeks-that is to say a population speaking Greek (whatever its racial source)-dwell in the southwest corner, around and west of Salonika, and along the coasts of the Aegean. They keep themselves quite apart from the Bulgarians of the interior, to whom they are generally superior in education. There are data for estimating their number (for statistics do not exist in Turkey, unless when invented to throw dust in Western eyes); but they are more numerous than the Servians of the NorthWest, though fewer than the Bulgarians. Scattered here and there through the country, especially in the South and South-West, there are villages of a people called Vlachs, speaking the same tongue as the Roumans of Roumania, and apparently of the same race. Some are pastoral in their habits, and mingle but little with the other populations. Some speak Greek as well as Vlach, and may practically be reckoned as part of the Greek element. Finally, on the West side of the peninsula, between the Adriatic and the great valley which North-West from Salonika to Pristina, one finds the Albanians, fierce mountaineers, mostly Musulmans, but pretty

no

runs

much the same in habits whether they are Musulmans or Christians, finding their chief pleasure in fighting, and diverted from their battles of clan against clan, only by the prospect of raiding the Christian peasantry of the lower country. Betweeen' them and districts chiefly peopled by their Greek, Servian, and Bulgarian neighbors, there is no boundary, either natural or legal; so that practically Albania must be considered as a part of Macedonia, just as the Scottish Highlands, though peopled by a different race and little controlled by the Stuart kings, were a part of Scotland and a potent factor of disorder in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So the conditions of the Macedonian problem cannot be understood without realizing the restless activity and ferocious rapacity of these wild hillmen, a race of fine natural gifts and some primitive virtues, but at present a scourge to the country.

Each of these elements, to which one might add the Turkish, that is, the Mohammedan part of the population (small in the rural districts) is hostile to each of the others. The Vlachs are indeed too few and too backward to be of much account. But the Bulgarian is hated by the Servian, and still more bitterly hated by the Greek. The Servian and the Greek are less in contact, but love each other no better. The Albanian is impartial in his desire to rob and murder all three sets of Christians. Between the three Christian races there is no difference of creed, and practically none of ritual; for, though they belong to different ecclesiastical organizations, they are all members of the Orthodox Church of the East. Their antagonism is due to political rivalry. Each looks back to an Empire of the Middle Ages, the Bulgarians to the Tsar Simeon and the two Asêns, the Servians to the great days of Stephen

Dushan, the Greeks to the East Roman Empire, which had its seat at Constantinople. Each aspires to make itself the ruling race, and renew the long-faded glories of its remote past. The Greeks are less sanguine than they were thirty years ago of creating an Empire, which shall rule Thrace as well as Greece from the Bosphorus. But they still dread the rise of the Slav power, which would take from them lands they deem debatable, and in which they form the most cultivated element.

Each of these nationalties uses its churches and its schools as means of a racial and political propaganda. Each finds in an existing State that nucleus for an extended kingdom which Italy found in Piedmont, and Germany found in Prussia. The Servians in Macedonia have the sympathy and may have the armed help, of their brethren in Servia, in seeking to expand the Servian kingdom. The Bulgarians of Macedonia have a similar and more energetic support from the Bulgarians of the Principality; and the Greeks of the Greek kingdom would, it is to be feared, rather see Macedonia Turkish, than see it either Servian or Bulgarian, because in the latter case the chances of the northward extension of Greece would be greatly reduced. It might seem natural to reconcile these conflicting claims by a partition of Macedonian territory between the three Christian elements. But, unluckily, none of these three elements is in the occupation of a welldefined or definable region. Over considerable districts Servians are mixed with Bulgarians, over other districts Bulgarians are mixed with Greeks, nor is any race disposed to make a friendly compromise with any of the others.

These ethnological data need to be stated, in order that the conditions of the problem to be ultimately solved