While we are in Provence, our thoughts may lightly turn to M. Zola. If you wish to retain the fashionable (and, I admit, not unaccountable) prejudice against this writer, do not read "Nouvelle Campagne" (Charpentier), for it will force you to reconsider your position. It is impossible to run through these eighteen leaders reprinted from the Figaro-for that is all they pretend to be-without a conviction that the author is a very honest man. Left alone, in this ebb-tide of realism, a sort of roughly hewn rockgiant on the sand, M. Zola finds himself misunderstood, insulted, abandoned. And in his isolation he is grander, he is an object of more genuine sympathy, than ever he was in the days of his overwhelming prosperity. Adversitya very relative adversity, which does not effect the enormous bulk of his "sales" and his "royalties"-has been salutary to M. Zola; it has acted on him as an astringent. It has made him pull himself together and practise his pectoral muscles. It has even had a favorable effect upon his style, which seems to me to be more direct, less burdened with repetitions, less choked with words, than it usually is. M. Zola is very angry, and wrath is becoming to him. He seizes his club and glares round upon us. The effect is distinctly tremendous; he looks like Hercules, and sometimes a little like Polyphemus.

To be serious, the reaction against M. Zola has certainly proceeded too far. It has become a shield behind which all manner of effeminacies and hypocrisies have concealed themselves, and, if he were the Devil, it is time he should have his due. And nothing could be less like the Devil than M. Zola. He is a strenuous, conscientious bourgeois, rather sentimental and very romantic, with a Theory of Life which has ridden away with him, and makes him believe that he ought to be squalid and obscene wherever existence is obscene and squalid. But the heart of him is a heart of gold, and any candid person who reads "Nouvelle Campagne" will see how uneffectedly the author is everywhere on the side of the angels. His

very faults are virtues turned inside out; the anti-Malthusian essay, called "Dépopulation," throws a most curious light on this. But read his tender pleadings for kindness to animals ("L'Amour des Bêtes" and "Enfin Couronné"), his courageous defence of the Jews, his articles on literary property (where he gives points in ardor to our own unselfish Sir Walter Besant), his amusing, frank, and spirited replies to his juvenile detractors ("Le Crapaud," "A la Jeunesse," "Les Droits du Critique"), his extraordinarily generous single-handed defence of M. Paul Bourget ("Auteurs et Editeurs"), and then deny that M. Zola, besides being the most effective of living journalists, is, with all his surface faults, a very excellent and honest man.

Now that "John Gabriel Borkman" is being so much discussed in London, it may be interesting to many readers to know that an excellent translation of the drama has just been published in Paris (Perrin et Cie), from the pen of Isben's friend and enthusiastic commentator, Comte Prozor. It contains, in an interesting preface, some curious notes of the conversation of the poet.

EDMUND GOSSE.

IN KEDAR'S TENTS.1

BY HENRY SETON MERRIMAN, AUTHOR OF "THE SOWERS."

CHAPTER XXIX.

MIDNIGHT AND DAWN.

"I have set my life upon a cast.

And I will stand the hazard of the die."

"Excellency," reported a man, who entered the room at this moment, "they are bringing carts of fuel through the Calle de la Ciudad to set against the door and burn it."

"To set against which door, my hon est friend?"

"The great door on the plaza, excellency. The other is an old door

of

iron."

1 Copyright, 1897, by Henry Seton Merriman.

out, "it is an ill fortune to have to do with men whose trade this is." Estella smiled a little whitely and said nothing. The moon was now shining from an almost cloudless sky. The few fleecy remains of the storm sailing toward the east only added brightness to the night. It was almost possible to see the faces of the men moving in the square below, and to read their expressions. The majority stood in a group in the centre of the plaza, while a daring few, reckoning on the Spanish aversion to firearms, ran forward from time to time and set a bundle of wood or straw against the door beneath the balcony.

Some, who appeared to be the lead ers, looked up constantly and curiously at the windows, wondering if any resistance would be made. Had they known that General Vincente was in that silent house, they would probably have gone home to bed, and the crowd would have dispersed like smoke.

Suddenly there arose a roar to the right hand of the square, where the Calle de la Ciudad was situated, and Conyngham appeared for a moment alone, running toward the group with the moonlight flashing on his sword. At his heels an instant later a single line of men swung round the corner and charged across the square.

"Dear, dear," muttered the general; "too quick, my friend, too quick!"

For Conyngham was already among the crowd, which broke and swayed back toward the cathedral. He paused for a moment to draw his sword out of a dark form that lay upon the ground, as a cricketer draws a stump. He had at all events remembered the point. The troopers swept across the square like a broom, sending the people as dust before them, and leaving the clear, moonlit square behind. They also left behind one or two shadows, lying stark upon the ground. One of these got upon his hands and knees, and crawled painfully away, all onesided, like a beetle that has been trodden underfoot. Those watching from the windows saw, with a gasp of hor

ror, that part of him-part of an armhad been left behind, and a sigh of relief went up when he stopped crawling and lay quite still.

The troopers were now retreating slowly toward the Calle de la Ciudad.

"Be careful, Conyngham!" shouted the general from the balcony: "they will return."

And as he spoke a rattling fire was opened upon them from the far corner of the square, where the crowd had taken refuge in the opening of the Calle del Aico. Immediately the people, having noted that the troopers were few in number, charged down upon them. The men fought in line, retreating step by step, their swords gleaming in the moonlight. Estella, hearing footsteps in the room behind her, turned in time to see her father disappearing through the doorway. Concepcion Vara, coatless, as he loved to work, his white shirt sleeves fluttering as his arm swung, had now joined the troopers, and was fighting by Conyngham's side.

Estella and Julia were out on the balcony now, leaning over and forgetting all but the breathless interest of battle. Concha stood beside them, muttering and cursing like any soldier.

They saw Vincente appear at the corner of the Calle de la Ciudad and throw away his scabbard as he ran.

"Now, my children!" he cried, in a voice that Estella had never heard before, which rang out across the square, and was answered by a yell that was nothing but a cry of sheer delight. The crowd swayed back as if before a gust of wind, and the general, following it, seemed to clear a space for himself, as a reaper clears away the standing corn before him. It was, however, only for a moment. The crowd surged back, those in front against their will, and on to the glittering steel, those behind shouting encouragement.

shouted Concha, and

"Caramba!" was gone. They saw him a minute later appear in the square, having thrown aside

his cassock. He made a strange, lean figure of a man, with his knee-breeches and dingy purple stockings, his grey flannel shirt, and the moonlight shining on his tonsured head. He fought without skill and heedless of danger, swinging a great sword that he had picked up from the hand of a fallen trooper, and each blow that he got home killed its man. The mettle of the man had suddenly shown itself after years of suppression. This, as Vincente had laughingly said, was no priest, but a soldier.

Concepcion, in the thick of it, using the knife now with a deadly skill, looked over his shoulder and laughed. Suddenly the crowd swayed. The faint sound of a distant bugle came to the ears of all.

"It is nothing," shouted Concha in English-"it is nothing! It is I who sent the bugler round."

And his great sword whistled into a man's brain. In a moment the square was empty, for the politicians who came to murder a woman had had enough steel. The sound of the bugle, intimating, as they supposed, the ar rival of troops, completed the work of demoralization which the recognition of General Vincente had begun.

The little party, the few defenders of the Casa del Ayuntamiento, were left in some confusion in the plaza, and Estella saw, with a sudden cold fear, that Conyngham and Concha were on their knees in the midst of a little group of hesitating men. It was Concha who first rose and held up his hand to the watchers on the balcony, bidding them stay where they Then Conyngham rose to his feet, slowly, as one bearing a burden. Estella looked down in a sort of dream and saw her lover carrying her father toward the house, her mind only half comprehending, in the semi-dreamlike reception of sudden calamity, which is one of Heaven's deepest mercies.

were.

It was Concepcion who came into the room first, his white shirt dyed with blood in great patches, like the color on a piebald horse. A cut in his

cheek was slowly dripping. He went straight to a sofa covered in gorgeous yellow satin and set the cushions in order.

"Señorita," he said, and spread out his hands. The tears were in his eyes. "Half of Spain," he added, "would rather that it had been the queen, and the world is poorer."

A minute later Concha came into the room dragging on his cassock.

"My child, we are in God's hands," he said, with a break in his gruff voice.

And then came the heavy step of one carrying sorrow.

Conyngham laid his burden on the sofa. General Vincente was holding his handkerchief to his side, and his eyes, which had a thoughtful look, saw only Estella's face.

"I have sent for a doctor," said Conyngham; "your father is wounded."

"Yes," added Vincente immediately, "but I am in no pain, my dear child. There is no reason, surely, for us to distress ourselves."

He looked round and smiled. "And this good Conyngham," added, "carried me like a child."

Julia was on her knees at the foot of the sofa, her face hidden in her hands.

"My dear Julia," he said, "why this distress?"

he

"Because all of this is my doing," she answered, lifting her drawn and terror-stricken face.

"No, no," said Vincente, with a characteristic pleasantry; “you take too much upon yourself. All these things are written down for us beforehand. We only add the punctuation, delaying a little or hurrying a little."

They looked at him silently, and assuredly none could mistake the shadows that were gathering on his face. Estella, who was holding his hand, knelt on the floor by his side, quiet and strong, offering silently that sympathy which is woman's greatest gift.

Concepcion, who perhaps knew more

of this matter than any present, looked at Concha and shook his head. The priest was buttoning his cassock,