in any direction. Then he leaned over the side of his car and looked downward. There was the great shell directly under him, but under it and around it, extending as far beneath it as it extended in every other direction, was the light from his own lamps, and yet that great shell, weighing many tons, lay as if it rested upon the solid ground.

After a few moments Clewe shut his eyes; they pained him. Something seemed to be coming into them like a fine frost in a winter wind. Then he called to Bryce to let the car descend very slowly. It went down, down, gradually approaching the great shell. When the bottom of the car was within two feet of it, Clewe rang to stop. He looked down at the complicated machine he had worked upon so long, with something like a feeling of affection. This he knew, it was his own. Looking upon its familiar form, he felt that he had a companion in this region of unreality.

Pushing back the sliding door of the car, Clewe sat upon the bottom and cautiously put out his feet and legs, lowering them until they touched the shell. It was firm and solid. Although he knew it must be so, the immovability of the great mass of iron gave him a sudden shock of mysterious fear. How could it be immovable when there was nothing under it?

But he must get out of that car, he must explore, he must find out. There certainly could be no danger so long as he could cling to his shell.

He now cautiously got out of the car and let himself down upon the shell. It was not a pleasant surface to stand upon, being uneven, with great spiral ribs, and Clewe sat down upon it, clinging to it with his hands. Then he leaned over to one side and looked beneath him. The shadows of that shell went down, down, down, until it made him sick to look at it. He drew back quickly, clutched the shell with his arms, and shut his eyes. He felt as if he were about to drop with it into a measureless depth of atmosphere.

But he soon raised himself. He had not come down here to be frightened, to let his nerves run away with him. He had come to find out things. What was it that this shell rested upon? Seizing two of the ribs with a strong clutch, he let himself hang over the sides of the shell until his feet were level with its lower side. They touched something hard. He pressed them downward; it was very hard. He raised himself and stood upon the substance which supported the shell. It was

as solid as any rock. He looked down and saw his shadow stretching far beneath him. It seemed as if he were standing upon petrified air. He put out one foot and he moved a little, still holding on to the shell. He walked, as if upon solid air, to the foremost end of the long projectile. It relieved him to turn his thoughts from what was around him to the familiar object. He found its conical end shattered and broken.

After a little he slowly made his way back to the other end of the shell, and now his eyes became somewhat accustomed to the great radiance about him. He thought he could perceive here and there faint indications of long, nearly horizontal lines -lines of different shades of light. Above him, as if hung in the air, was the round, dark hole through which he had descended.

He rose, took his hands from the shell, and made a few steps. He trod upon a horizontal surface, but in putting one foot forward, he felt a slight incline. It seemed to him that he was about to slip downward! Instantly he retreated to the shell and clutched it in a sudden frenzy of fear.

Standing thus, with his eyes still wandering, he heard the bell of the telephone ring. Without hesitation he mounted the shell and got into the car. Bryce was calling him. "Come up," he said. "You have been down there long enough. No matter what you have found, it is time for you to come up."

Roland Clewe was not accustomed to receive commands, but he instantly closed the sliding door of the car, seated himself, and put his mouth to the telephone.

"All right," he said.

slowly at first."

"You can haul me up, but go very

The car rose. When it reached the orifice in the top of the cave of light, Clewe heard the conical steel top grate slightly as it touched its edge, for it was still swinging a little from the motion given to it by his entrance; but it soon hung perfectly vertical and went silently up the shaft.

COLONEL BRERETON'S AUNTY.1

By H. C. BUNNER.

(From "Short Sixes.")

[HENRY CUYLER BUNNER: An American poet, story writer, and humorist; born in Oswego, N. Y., 1855. He was the editor of Puck from its inception down to the time of his death at Nutley, N.J., in 1896. Aside from his editorials, which were noteworthy for their pungency and literary form and for their sanity, he published among others, “A Woman of Honor" (1883), “Airs from Arcady" (1884), “The Midge: a Story of New York Life" (1886), "The Story of a New York House" (1887), "Short Sixes," which first appeared serially in Puck, etc. "The Lost Child" and "My Aromatic Uncle" are among his numerous articles written for the magazines, and he also wrote, in collaboration with Brander Matthews, "In Partnership," in 1883.]

THE pleasant smell of freshly turned garden mold and of young growing things came in through the open window of the Justice of the Peace. His nasturtiums were spreading, pale and weedy- I could distinguish their strange, acrid scent from the odor of the rest of the young vegetation. The tips of the morning-glory vines, already up their strings to the height of a man's head, curled around the window frame, and beckoned to me to come out and rejoice with them in the freshness of the mild June day. It was pleasant enough inside the Justice's front parlor, with its bright ingrain carpet, its gilt clock, and its marble-topped center table. But the Justice and the five gentlemen who were paying him a business call. although it was Sunday morning-looked, the whole halfdozen of them, ill in accord with the spirit of the spring day. The Justice looked annoyed. The five assembled gentlemen looked stern.

"Well, as you say," remarked the fat little Justice, who was an Irishman, "if this divilment goes on

"It's not a question of going on, Mr. O'Brien," broke in Alfred Winthrop; "it has gone on too long."

Alfred is a little inclined to be arrogant with the unwinthropian world; and, moreover, he was rushing the season in a very grand suit of white flannels. He looked rather too much of a lord of creation for a democratic community. Antagonism lit the Justice's eye.

"I'm afraid we've got to do it, O'Brien," I interposed 1 Copyright, 1891, by Keppler & Schwarzmann.

hastily. The Justice and I are strong political allies. He was mollified.

"Well, well," he assented; "let's have him up and see what he's got to say for himself. Mike!" he shouted out the window, "bring up Colonel Brereton ! "

Colonel Brereton had appeared in our village about a year before that Sunday. Why he came, whence he came, he never deigned to say. But he made no secret of the fact that he was an unreconstructed Southron. He had a little money when he arrived enough to buy a tiny one-story house on the outskirts of the town. By vocation he was a lawyer, and, somehow or other, he managed to pick up enough to support him in his avocation, which, we soon found out, was that of village drunkard. In this capacity he was a glorious, picturesque, and startling success. Saturated with cheap whisky, he sat all day long in the barroom or on the porch of the village groggery, discoursing to the neighborhood loafers of the days befo' the wah, when he had a vast plantation in "Firginia” — “and five hundred niggehs, seh."

So long as the Colonel's excesses threatened only his own liver, no one interfered with him. But on the night before we called upon the Justice, the Colonel, having brooded long over his wrongs at the hands of the Yankees, and having made himself a reservoir of cocktails, decided to enter his protest against the whole system of free colored labor by cutting the liver out of every negro in the town; and he had slightly lacerated Winthrop's mulatto coachman before a delegation of citizens fell upon him, and finding him unwilling to relinquish his plan, placed him for the night in the lockup in Squire O'Brien's cellar.

We waited for the Colonel. From under our feet suddenly arose a sound of scuffling and smothered imprecations. A minute later, Mike, the herculean son of the Justice, appeared in the doorway, bearing a very small man hugged to his breast as a baby hugs a doll.

"Let me down, seh!" shouted the Colonel. Mike set him down, and he marched proudly into the room, and seated himself with dignity and firmness on the extreme edge of a chair.

The Colonel was very small indeed for a man of so much dignity. He could not have been more than five foot one or two; he was slender - but his figure was shapely and supple. He was unquestionably a handsome man, with fine, thin features

and an aquiline profile-like a miniature Henry Clay. His hair was snow white-prematurely, no doubt and at the first glance you thought he was clean shaven. Then you saw that there was scarcely a hair on his cheeks, and that only the finest imaginable line of snowy white mustaches curled down his upper lip. His skin was smooth as a baby's and of the color of old ivory. His teeth, which he was just then exhibiting in a sardonic smile, were white, small, even. But if he was small, his carriage was large and military. There was something military, too, about his attire. He wore a high collar, a long blue frock coat, and tight, light gray trousers with straps. That is, the coat had once been blue, the trousers once light gray, but they were now of many tints and tones, and, at that exact moment, they had here and there certain peculiar high lights of whitewash.

The Colonel did not wait to be arraigned. Sweeping his black piercing eye over our little group, he arraigned us.

"Well, gentlemen," with keen irony in his tone, "I reckon you think you've done a right smart thing, getting the Southern gentleman in a hole? A pro-dee-gious fine thing, I reckon, since it's kept you away from chu'ch. Baptis' church, I believe?" This was to poor Canfield, who was suspected of having been of that communion in his youth, and of being much ashamed of it after his marriage to an aristocratic Episcopalian. "Nice Sunday mo'ning to worry a Southern gentleman! Gentleman who's owned a plantation that you could stick this hyeh picayune town into one co'neh of! Owned mo' niggehs than you eveh saw. Robbed of his land and his niggehs by you Yankee gentlemen. Drinks a little wine to make him fo'get what he's suffehed. Gets ovehtaken. Tries to avenge an insult to his honah. Put him in a felon's cell and whitewash his gyarments. And now you come hyehyou come hyeh-" here his eye fell with deep disapproval upon Winthrop's white flannels-"you come hyeh in youh underclothes, and you want to have him held fo' Special Sessions."

"You are mistaken, Colonel Brereton," Winthrop interposed; "if we can have your promise

"I will promise you nothing, seh!" thundered the Colonel, who had a voice like a church organ, whenever he chose to use it; "I will make no conventions with you! I will put no restrictions on my right to defend my honah. Put me in youh