I hate clearing up a good mystery as much as clearing up after a pleasant picnic. An explanation is as bad as the moral at the end of the story, or the medicine after a party. No, I took the coach to St. Enimie because I hoped to get a second helping of horrors, and was properly served for my greediness. I should have known better. A Sorcerer and an Enchanted Castle, behind Seven Rapids and Eleven Deeps, a Great Ratch and a Little Ratch, a Milling Whirlpool and Boulders of Bramabiau, and a Magician with red eyes and pointed ears, who fought with stones and magic arrows until the magician was captured by Flying Genii-was too marvellously mediævally magical a mystery to last. Wherefore the moral of this story-which I have caught you with before you expected it-is, no one may have two helps of magic and escape a dose of materialism. Do you, therefore, be warned in time, and leave me at the inn and let me take the post-cart to St. Enimie alone. So shall you be a good ghost story to the good, and earn the respect of all authors. Shake hands! May we meet again in

another story.

Hullo! Here you are still, after fifteen miles of Causse. Well, if you will have it, get out with me at the Trout Inn and be met by Lisette with a smile and an assurance that Monsieur's room and breakfast are ready for him, and that he was expected to dinner last night. Monsieur is gratified, but asks why he is expected, and is assured that everyone knows he has come to attend the process. Monsieur sniffing a clearing-up, regrets privately that he has come— and publicly that he has been summoned home and that he has only alighted while the coach changes horses. Monsieur, however, is volubly given to understand that he fails to realise the situation. Lisette is despatched, with flying cap-strings, and presently returns with a functionary and a document. The functionary is obviously deaf and apparently dumb, and consequently only morally important; not so the document, which is to the general effect that the Sieur Esq British subject, is required to attend, etc. etc., to attest service of process by the Sieur Dubois on the Sieur Cahusac in the suit for debt brought against the said Sieur Cahusac by other Sieurs. Clearly explanations of the worst sort are imminent, and, I fear me, functionaries and documents being concerned, inevitable. Who will explain as shortly as possible the connection between a subpoena to an action for debt and two sorcerers, an enchanted château, and divers flying genii?

'Lisette,' I say, ' come and give me breakfast, and explain to me

this document. Who is the Sieur Esq British subject, and who are these other gentlemen?'

'The Sieur Esq? but it is the Monsieur himself. His name copied from one of his letters which I lent the greffier so that there should be no mistake-it is so necessary to be accurate in these legal affairs. Then the Sieur Cahusac is the old Count, and the Sieur Dubois is of course the companion of Monsieur.'

What the long man with the pointed ears and red eyes? Am I to lose two sorcerers in the same miserable lawsuit? Tell me about the Sieur Dubois, Lisette, I can spare him better than the Old One.'

'Oh, hasn't Monsieur heard? why, the whole country talks of nothing else. Well, after he descended to the castle

6

'Stop, Lisette,' I objected; that's not the right place. Go back two pages and begin with the Cariole.'

'Oh, the Cariole-I thought Monsieur had seen all that. Well, as everyone knows, this Dubois, he swore he would serve his process on the Count, and the creditors promised him a thousand francs if he succeeded. For it's not so easy as to say good-day to serve a process on the Old One. Look you, there must be a witness, and it must be handed to the Count himself, and he lives alone, and none dare approach him but this Dubois, and he cannot attain to him in the château, though he tries again and again. So this time he goes with Monsieur.'

Monsieur was wanted evidently as a witness. Lisette, you are playing the deuce with the magic ; but why didn't he tell me this?' Because he knew a gentleman wouldn't help a process-server; and he made me promise-but with threats-to say nothing. Oh. he's clever, this Dubois, he thinks of everything. Well, as I was saying, there he is with Monsieur, planted on the sand bank, and no means of entering the château, when he perceives that the Old One is working his Cariole.'

'Ah, the Cariole. Explanatory footnote on the Cariole, please, Lisette. But oh, Lisette, be gentle with it: you can have no idea what a gruesome, grisly monster it was.'

'Plaît-il? But of course Monsieur knows all about the Carioles, for they say it was the English first used them to provision their castles in the gorges. Now we use them to save trouble, because evidently it is more labour to carry things down from the Causse than to let them slide down a wire.'

'A wire? Oh, Lisette, there goes in one swoop the pale arro

and the humming vibrations, and I fear me the genii are about to return into the bottle.'

'Well,' continued Lisette, too bent on narrative to notice such an irrelevant interruption, so the faggots went sliding down the wire and this devil of a Dubois thinks of nothing else than to slide down with one.'

'Faggots? with long spidery boughs sticking out and spinning? There go all the genii in one swoop. So he got well into the middle of one with snappings and crunchings, and as he went his coat-tails flapped and his trousers fluttered-Lisette, I feel bad at the stomach.'

'This, poor Monsieur-all emotioned at the recollection? But courage, all ends well. When he falls on the wood-heap there is the Count stacking the faggots, and there remains nothing but to hand him the paper. And the Count says to him, with his noble air --for he is an Old One of the Old Lot, this Count: “My compliments, I am pleased to entertain so courageous a process-server; and if you were otherwise I would have the pleasure of your company at supper." So the Count brings him his supper in his room, and gives him five francs next morning for his coach.'

I did not have to attend in court after all, for the Count com pounded with his creditors, and died a few years later. The château is now a well-kept little hotel owned by the Société pour la Vulgarisation des Régions Pittoresques de la France.' There, some day, you will alight from your punt, somewhat stiff and splashed after traversing the Seven Rapids and Eleven Deeps, the Great Ratch and the Little Ratch, the Milling Whirlpool and the Boulders of Bramabiau. You will also hear the local version of this story, for you will have in your pocket a circular ticket entitling you to a seat on a kitchen chair in a punt (for as long as you can retain it) and an account of each object of interest repeated by rote by a personal conductor (in so far as he can remember it). You would also do well to have a letter to the Consul's wife.

GEORGE YOUNG.

CHARLES DARWIN: A CENTENARY SKETCH.

6

ONE of my quaintest recollections of a singularly quaint and picturesque personage is the fondness with which John Stuart Blackie, perfervid Scot and idealist Grecian, a silver-haired Professor in a poet's plaid, used to acclaim the year 1809. It is the Annus Mirabilis of the century,' he would cry, the year in which more great men entered this world than any other. It was the birth year of Gladstone and Lincoln, and Tennyson and FitzGerald and Wendell Holmes, and Poe and Mendelssohn and Chopin and Darwin and Monckton Milnes and John Stuart Blackie.' I think the bright blue eyes used to flash more over the recital of so renowned a list than they twinkled at the conclusion, so unexpected by the hearer. Be that as it may, the list includes more men than one who profoundly modified the world into which they were born. In music, indeed, the revolutionaries were not yet; but Tennyson with his exquisitely polished lute gave his countrymen not only new beauties of word and song but a new poetic interpretation of Nature in relation to man and his new knowledge. Gladstone forwarded a democratic expansion which has incalculably altered the balance of constitutional power in our own country; Lincoln, with blood and tears, founded a new and mere hallowed Union of the Great West; Darwin, by finding a vera causa for the majestic processes of creative nature, initiated a revolution of thought confined to no country and to no continent.

And now the clock of the centuries has moved full circle. A hundred years completed since the birth of Charles Darwin, we pause at the rounded number and look back over a field of intellectual change unparalleled since the Renaissance. As then there was a new learning, new discoveries of buried knowledge, new sources to be opened up, all contributing to the marvellous new illumination, every voyage among the old-new books like a venture to one of the newly opened quarters of the globe, with measureless possibilities of treasure in golden ideas and revelations beyond the narrow limits of the accepted doctrines; so now a great and fertile idea once established burst the dykes of ancient orthodoxy that hemmed thought in; it gave coherence to the incoherent

accumulations of natural knowledge; it stimulated research to find further proof or disproof of its validity; it made advance possible by providing an intelligible line along which to work. All the natural sciences were affected by it; all responded to its vivifying touch. Science withal acquired a new dignity. It re-interpreted man's nature and man's destiny; it offered new clues to the relation between him and the universe in which he finds himself; it attempted to fling a bridge, however frail, over the dark chasm that severs the material and the mental worlds. It called out a new metaphysic and a new theology, profoundly affected by the fresh view of the universe without and of the world of psychology and ethics within. Natural science, therefore, shared in the honourable dignity so long accorded to these thought-sciences.

What manner of man was he who put this new and fruitful life into the ancient evolutionary idea? How was he equipped for the task by his natural birthright and his early education?

He sprang from two distinguished stocks. His father was a successful doctor in Shrewsbury, wise, sympathetic, and observant, quick to read character and to inspire confidence. Though forming a theory for almost everything which occurred, he had not a scientific mind, and did not try to generalise his knowledge under general laws; man, rather than nature, was his chief study, and his only taste in the direction of natural history was the love of plants in his garden. Indeed, the inherited love of natural history and the scientific turn of mind were more apparent in his brothers, the other sons of the famous Dr. Erasmus Darwin.

These qualities were revived in Charles Darwin. He shared, too, Erasmus's 'vividness of imagination' which led to 'his overpowering tendency to theorise and generalise,' though in the grandson's case this tendency was kept in check by his determination to test his theories to the utmost.' They had the same benevolence, sympathy, and charm of manner, the same indifference to fame and absence of self-conceit, the same swift anger over inhumanity or injustice; but, instead of Erasmus's love of mechanism and his literary and poetical temperament, Charles displayed a love of exercise and field sports, and a unique modesty and simplicity of character free from any acerbity or severity of temper which may have existed in Erasmus.

The other distinguished stock from which Charles Darwin sprang was that of the Wedgwoods, with their practical sense and power to turn inventive faculty to account. His mother, Susannah