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Rh ," a bowing down of the head, and a "piteous"—as old writers would say—extension of the hands and fingers, as if for mercy.

"If not of the murder itself," continued the magistrate.

César's head fell upon his chest, and he said nothing. But the eyes of the silent, watchful little Irish boy gleamed and sparkled with intelligence.

"Have mercy, sir, upon me—spare me, good sir!" gasped the Maltese. "Give me time. Let me consult my friends, and I will tell all."

The words sounded more like the low whining of a beaten dog than the voice—once so clear, sharp, and resonant—of César Negretti.

"You shall have plenty of time, and every opportunity," said the magistrate. "We will see you properly taken care of, and go fully into the case to-morrow."

César and Patsy were therefore removed; and, after some talk with Old Daylight in regard to Mr. Edgar Wade—for whose appearance Tom Forster himself undertook to answer, being supplied with the proper instrument for compelling his attendance—Mr. Horton left.

As Forster passed Sergeant Brownjohn, that functionary said—

"Well, I am as sorry as if it were my own case. Yours seems to break down as well as mine, although you were on the right track."

"Ah! my friend," said Old Daylight, with a sigh, "it was a race between us. One of Two, you know. And, as far as I see, I have the right evidence; and you, although you did not intend it, have arrested the right man."

He nodded in the direction in which César Negretti had disappeared as he spoke.

FTER quoting Voltaire's lament that the empire of reason was driving "the airy reign of fancy" far away from the earth, Lord Woodhouselee observes:—" It will require genius of a very remarkable order ever to revive among the polished nations of Europe a fervid taste for the romance of chivalry."

Professor Morley, in a lecture upon "King Arthur's Place in Literature," says:—"It is an indication of the bright genius of the present, which lays hold upon the Arthur myth as something real, something significant, something that one may make a part of one's own time and thought in the present day."

And to this present, of which Professor Morley speaks, Simrock also looked forward, since—after speaking of the second bloom of the German language and literature developed towards the end of the eighteenth century, out of which "may be seen the seeds of a new national consciousness ripening"—he adds: "If this be the case—and with high beating heart we see daily the mighty shoots of the young plant preserved—then will also the poets who dominated in the earlier period of our nation be no longer strange to us; and Wolfram von Eschenbach, the most German of all, be worthy of the greatest right to our admiration and to our love."

It is more than fifty years since Lord Woodhouselee wrote the passage alluded to—it is almost a hundred since Voltaire died; and the utilitarian spirit that both saw coming and come among the nations may have done its work, and man may have a brief breathing space given him wherein he may sit down and attend to that culture which Mr. Matthew Arnold so desires to find among his fellow-beings: a time to turn from the outer life to the inner, and, by raising the latter to its highest, refine and ennoble the work-day world that lies around, and possibly bring upon the earth some of the chivalrous spirit depicted in the mediæval romances. For a little chivalry in a man's nature makes him none the worse a man—rather the better and the nobler—though the Mammon-worshipping world may call him romantic and Quixotic.

Progress is rough work, and carries man along too swiftly to give him time to wipe the dust and dirt from off his brow. Yet progress is the stepping-stone to the great ideal to be hewn out of it—even as the beautiful statue is shaped from the rough, unpolished, yet valuable block of Carrara marble.

Rough, uncouth, unplastic, unsightly, in confusion, is much of the raw material that progress and utilitarianism have produced; and, as poetry is the first refining effort of barbarism, so may the second bloom of poetic thought and inspiration be the awakener of a new reign of high chivalrous feeling in