,

of buildings with a frightened air. 'La Belle Alliance,' he thought, 'or Hougoumont - which? — These Belgians planted a lot of wheat, and now there are red poppies all through it. Where is Ney and his cavalry?— No, Stuart and his cavalry - His mind righted for a moment. "This is a long battle, and a long night. Come, Death! Come, Death!' The shadowy line of boulders became a line of Deaths, tall, draped figures bearing scythes. Three Deaths, then a giant hour-glass, then three Deaths, then the hour-glass. He stared, fascinated. 'Which scythe? The one that starts out of line now if I can keep them still in line - just so long will I live!' He stared for a while, till the Deaths became boulders again and his fingers fell to playing with the thickening blood on the ground beside him. A meteor pierced the night-a white fireball thrown from the ramparts of the sky. He seemed to be rushing with it, rushing, rushing, rushing, a rushing river. There was a heavy sound. A clear voice said in his ear, "That was the last grain of sand in the hour-glass.' As his head sank back he saw again the line of Deaths, and the one that left the line.

Below, through the night, the wind that blew over the wheat-fields and the meadows, the orchards and the woods, was a moaning wind. It was a wind with a human voice.

Dawn came, but the guns smeared her translucence with black. The sun rose, but the ravens' wings hid him. Dull-red and sickly-copper was this day, hidden and smothered by dark wreaths. Many things happened in it; variation and change that cast a tendril toward the future.

Day drove on; sultry and loud and smoky. A squad of soldiers in a fencecorner, waiting for the order forward, exchanged opinions. "Three days.

'D'ye reckon if one of us took a bucket and went over to that spring there, he'd be shot?'- 'Of course he would! Besides, where's the bucket?' - 'I've got a canteen '- 'I've got a cup'- 'Say, Sergeant, can we go?''No. You'll be killed.' — 'I'd just as soon be killed as die of thirst! Besides a shell 'll come plumping down directly and kill us anyhow "Talk of something pleasant.'-'Jim's caught a grasshopper! Poor little hoppergrass, you ought n't to be out here in this wide and wicked world! Let him go, Jim.'-'How many killed and wounded do you reckon there are?'- 'Thirty thousand of us, and sixty thousand of them.' — 'I wish that smoke would lift so's we could see something!'Look out! Look out! Get out of this!

Two men crawled away from the crater made by the shell. A heavy tussock of grass in their path stopped them. One rose to his knees, the other, who was wounded, took the posture of the dying Gaul in the Capitoline. 'Who are you?' said the one. 'I am Jim Dudley. Who are you?' — 'I-I did n't know you, Jim. I'm Randolph. -Well, we're all that's left.'

The dead horses lay upon this field one and two and three days in the furnace heat. They were fearful to see and there came from them a fetid odor. But the scream of the wounded horses was worse than the sight of the dead. There were many wounded horses. They lay in wood and field, in country lane and orchard. No man tended them, and they knew not what it was all about. To and fro and from side to side of the vast, cloud-wreathed Mars' Shield galloped the riderless horses.

At one of the clock all the guns, blue and gray, opened in a cannonade that shook the leaves of distant trees. A smoke as of Vesuvius or Etna, sulphurous, pungent, clothed the region of battle. The air reverberated and the hills trembled. The roar was like the roar of the greatest cataract of a larger world, like the voice of a storm sent by the King of all the Genii. Amid its deep utterance the shout even of many men could not be heard.

Out from the ranks of the fortress's defenders rushed a gray, world-famous charge. It was a division chargingthree brigades en échelon - five thoufive thousand men, led by a man with long auburn locks. Down a hill, across a rolling open, up an opposite slope,-half a mile in all, perhaps, - lay their road. Mars and Bellona may be figured in the air above it. It was a spectacle, that charge, fit to draw the fierce eyes and warm the gloomy souls of all the warrior deities. Woden may have watched and the Aztec god. The blue artillery crowned that opposite slope, and other slopes. The blue artillery swung every muzzle; it spat death upon the five thousand. The five thousand went steadily, gray, and cool, and clear, the vivid flag above them. A light was on their bayonets- the three lines of bayonets- the three brigades, Garnett and Kemper and Armistead. A light was in the eyes of the men; they saw the fortress above the battleclouds; they saw their homes, and the watchers upon the ramparts. They went steadily, to the eyes of history in a curious, unearthly light, the light of a turn in human affairs, the light of catastrophe, the light of an ending and a beginning.

When they came into the open between the two heights, the massed blue infantry turned every rifle against them. There poured a leaden rain of death. Here, too, the three lines met

an enfilading fire from the batteries on Round Top. Death howled and threw himself against the five thousand; in the air above might be heard the Valkyries calling. There were not now five thousand, there were not now four thousand. There was a clump of trees seen like spectres through the smoke. It rose from the slope which was the gray goal, from the slope peopled by Federal batteries, with a great Federal infantry support at hand. Toward this slope, up this slope went Pickett's Charge.

Garnett fell dead. Kemper and Trimble were desperately wounded. Save Pickett himself all mounted officers were down. The men fell - the men fell; Death swung a fearful scythe. There were not now four thousand; there were not now three thousand. And still the vivid flag went on; and still, 'Yaaaaih! Yaaaaiihhhh! Yaiiihhhaaiihhh!' yelled Pickett's Charge.

There was a stone wall to cross. Armistead, his hat on the point of his waved sword, leaped upon the coping. A bullet pierced his breast; he fell and died. By now, by now the charge was whittled thin! Oh, thick as the leaves of Vallombrosa the fortress's dearest and best lay upon that slope beneath the ravens' wings! On went the thin, fierce ranks, on and over the wall, on and up, into the midst of the enemy's guns. The two flags strained toward each other; the hands of the gray were upon the guns of the blue; there came a wild mêlée. There were not two thousand now, and the guns were yet roaring, and the blue infantry gathered from all sides

"The smoke,' says one Luther Hopkins, a gray soldier who was at Gettysburg, 'the smoke rose higher and higher and spread wider and wider, hiding the sun, and then, gently dropping back, hid from human eyes the dreadful tragedy. But the battle went on and

on, and the roar of the guns continued. After a while, when the sun was sinking to rest, there was a hush. The noise died away. The winds came creeping back from the west, and gently lifting the coverlet of smoke, revealed

a strange sight. The fields were all carpeted, a beautiful carpet, a costly carpet, more costly than Axminster or velvet. The figures were horses and men all matted and woven together with skeins of scarlet thread.'

I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE GUTTER I SUPPOSE it is because nature dazzles us with such an exuberance of wealth overhead that there is so little time to look for her wind-falls. Some day, perhaps, people will grow tired of star-gazing and will turn their eyes to the Gutter; then they will find the Gutter-babies, and many wonderful things.

A little way out on the map of life, every pilgrim from his own mountain of myrrh must make his venture; some of us have a natural tendency to the Gutter. It is much better than going to the wall. No psychologist could possibly find a more convenient observatory, for nowhere else is human correspondence so abruptly gracious and intimate. Here the dirtiest and most diminutive of Gutter-atoms crawl safely through the elementary stages of infancy into precocious adolescence, far from the battle of hoofs and wheels and the congested struggle of the highway. For the Gutter is the nursery of the poor.

Here, too, are foreigners among the

natives, stars who have dropped out of an unknown and uncharted meridian, with queer and often pathetic biographies of their own, which they will tell, but not at all times or to all inquirers.

Once I met a youthful philosopher in the flattest pose possible to rotund humanity, with pink heels kicking at vacuum, and a cunning nose leveled to the grating of a drain.

It was my Johnny.

'Do you like smelling drains, Johnny?'

He lifted a somewhat apoplectic countenance to explain. 'It ain't the bloomin' drain what matters, it's what comes out of its bloody inside! Once my Rosie, her finded a fadger here.' Johnny smiled a great, blissful, expectant smile. 'I'm lookin' for a dear little shiner!' he said.

'We will play that game together, Johnny.'

So we did, he and I, and never got tired of it.

I was walking with a very small person; she was dressed in a tumbled cotton frock and a sunbonnet with one string. Otherwise she was quite

curiously unlike the local lady. As we proceeded, the small person became confidential. Her name was Blanche, and Johnny claimed her as a relative because she was brought up by his aunt, who took Gutter-babies to mind, and she called Johnny's twin cousins, Alf and Earn, her brothers. But many streets and many gutters divided them from Special Johnny, and if it had not been for the call of the blood it is doubtful if the authorities would even have permitted them to play together. For the twins' dad was a gentleman all the week, and the little boys had their hair curled and wore velveteen on Sundays. The steps into society are frequently quite as abrupt in the Gutter-world, but Blanchie was the secret of this family's success.

She was a Gutter-baby Wonder.

All day long she said her lessons and sucked sweets surreptitiously in the big school of the Gutter-babies, ate a scrappy fish dinner on her way out to play, just like the normal Gutter-baby, and romped and fought and wept through Gutter-life, the merriest and most mischievous of the little wild people, the spoiled darling of our set.

This was the Blanchie that we knew best, a wistful, precocious, sharp-witted creature, with whom, always and everywhere, flowed the warm and glowing atmosphere of the Guardian Spirit, called out of his art heaven to mind this wayward nursling of Genius through her extraordinary and very earthly career.

But when her playmates were cuddled together dreaming, with their restless limbs and chattering tongues as still as they ever are (for every real Gutter-baby tosses and moans in his sleep), while Johnny lay on his back snoring, and the twins slept sweetly in pink flannelette, with their golden hair securely fastened up in pins, — all - all night long before two 'houses' a very

absurdly rosy and professionally-smiling Blanchie, in a short skirt, tripped about on the points of satin slippers, singing loudly through her nose, as she held sway over a troupe of over-grown and clumsy fairies in an obscurely suburban music-hall. The presence of the Guardian, paling and sick at this sordid insult to his art, yet more brilliant than the blinding limelight, wrapped itself about her innocence, so that the cold world, which shuts its heart against Gutter-babies, found a tender thought for the art-nursling, and someone would remember his own spoiled darling asleep on a soft pillow, and someone else would offer to see her safely across the road to the station. A tiny fist it was that he held, gripping fast a bulky treasure tucked away inside a cotton glove the three pennies for her return fare to Shepherd's Bush.

But the small person was talking to

me.

'I shan't do no acting when I'm big, you know, there won't be time.'

I wondered why, and was presently informed with due solemnity.

'I'm a scholar; I'm sharp at my lessons; they think they learned me to read at schule, but they never. I knew my letters off the 'busses before I could walk.'

I dropped the foolish air of patronage which one sometimes assumes for the benefit of Gutter-babies who require cultivating, and became respectful.

"Then I suppose you intend to be a teacher?'

'No, I'll have a schule; I'll be guvness!'

Presently she asked me cheerfully, 'Whatever did you take up with me for?'

I told her as well as I could, and then made an attempt to reply to a volley of questions.

'It's good to ask 'em, ain't it?'

I assented agreeably, supposing it to be at least the best way to learn the answer, anyway.

'Some don't seem to think so, but I reckons you can find out a lot this way, if you don't ask silly ones and put people off you.'

One great fear haunts and threatens the 'scholar's' brilliant future. It is that the terrible medical certificate may stop her 'schulin'.' It does happen sometimes to 'awful sharp kids.' Some day I suppose the art-nursling will arrive at independence and will go away with her books, shaking off the foster family (who will then cease to appear in velveteen on Sundays), and leaving behind her a little pair of worn-out dancing shoes with blunted toes.

Earn was not really a disagreeable little boy, in spite of his unfortunate weakness for curls and velveteen. He had a magnificent gift of lying, and a clinging affection for the environment of Johnny. At times it seemed as if he might be quite one of us some day. His mother was very proud of having reared him from seven months, and to this interesting fact in his early history she attributed all his many failings and eccentricities. After administering a vigorous chastisement she would console herself with the reflection, 'There, what can you expect of a sevenmonths'?'

She sent him to me the other day, seriously alarmed at his powers of mendacity, which were indeed remarkable, even for a Gutter-baby.

'The lying little 'ound,' she introduced him. 'I'm sure me and his dad no one can't say as 'ow we don't keep our children respectable, and I doos 'is 'air up every night, I do, and where he learns it I can't think. It all comes of takin' other people's to mind. They ain't like yer own. But there,' she finished, with a shrewd wink at me over

the golden head of the weeping Earn, 'what can you expect?'

We heard her patiently, but when she had gone we sat far into the teahour together, his soft confiding voice charming away the twilight. Both of us quite forgot why he had come, forgot that he was a mean little snob who told lies, a gutter weakling with tangled curls and curls and the Gutter-babies' chief abhorrence spotless linen! There narrow firelit walls, the hard edges of our little world, surrendered to a fairy kingdom of limitless dimensions. Spell-bound we followed the thread of his expert imagination through a narrative, which, if slightly incoherent and vaguely suggestive, was yet sufficiently graceful not to shame the great Grimms themselves.

Then a sudden hesitation, with no hope of continuation in our next, and no persuasion could drag from the orator anything but the most trivial conversation. It was the only glimpse I had into that vivid and fertile mental atmosphere. For the sickly, freakish energy of the 'seven-months' was easily exhausted, and his time with us was brief. But a few days after our interview he was observed playing with some other children at a school-treat on the shore at Bognor. A basket with the usual Gutter-baby treasures broken crockery, presents for loved ones at home, and the diminishing store of sticky pennies-slipped into the waves splashing stormily at high tide in a strong breeze.

The small group stared dismally at the tragedy, but the little despised boy, in his absurd tunic, with his damp curls tortured by the wind, singing to a trail of seaweed, all by himself, in his dreamy and vacant way, suddenly became the hero of the occasion, and waded out waist-deep among the breakers to recover the precious articles.

His dripping and triumphant return,,