I came out filled with a new sense of what was meant by the curses against the Pharisees. As I was walking along I ran into Wolffert.

"Ah! You are the very man. It is Providence! I was just thinking of you, and you ran into my arms. It is Fate." It did seem so. Mrs. Argand and her "dear count" had sickened me. Here, at least, was sincerity. But I wondered if he knew that Miss Leigh was within there.

"Father," said Eleanor, that evening, "I have a poor man whom I want a place for, and I must have it.”

Mr. Leigh smiled. "You generally do have. Is this one poorer than those others you have saddled on me?"

"Now don't be a tease. Levity is not becoming in a man of your dignity. This man is very poor, indeed, and he has a houseful of children—and his wife

"I know," said Mr. Leigh, throwing up his hand with a gesture of appeal. "I surrender. They all have. What can this one do? Butts says every foreman in the shops is complaining that we are filling up with a lot of men who don't want to do anything and couldn't do it if they did."

"Oh! This man is a fine workman. He is an expert machinist-has worked for years in boiler shops-has driven"

"Why is he out of a job if he is such a universal paragon? Does he drink? Remember, we can't take in men who drinka bucket of beer cost us twelve thousand dollars last year, not to mention the loss of two lives."

"He is as sober as a judge," declared his daughter, solemnly.

"What is it then?-Loafer?"

"He lost his place where he lived before by a strike."

"A striker, is he! Well, please excuse me. I have a plenty of that sort now without going outside to drag them in.”

"No-no-no— exclaimed Eleanor. "My! How you do talk! You won't give me a chance to say a word!"

"I like that," laughed her father. "Here I have been listening patiently to a catalogue of the virtues of a man I never heard of and simply asking questions, and as soon as I put in a pertinent one, away you go." "Well, listen. You have heard of him. I'll tell you who he is. You remember my telling you of the poor family that was

the train last year when I came back in Aunt Sophia's car and we delayed the train ?"

"I remember something about it. I never was sure as to the facts in the case. I only know that that paper contained a most infamous and lying attack on me

"I know it-it was simply infamousbut this poor man had nothing to do with it. That was his family, and they came on to join him because he had gotten a place. But the Union turned him out because he didn't belong to it, and then he wanted to join the Union, but the walking-delegate or something would not let him, and then he became a driver; but he lost that by his wife being ill, and now he has been out of work so long that they are simply starving." "You want some money, I suppose?" Mr. Leigh put his hand in his pocket.

"No. I have helped him, but he isn't a beggar he wants work. He's the real thing, Dad, and I feel rather responsible, because Aunt Sophia turned them out of the house they had rented, and-though that young lawyer I told you of won his case for him and saved his furniture-the little bit he had he has lost it all through the loan-sharks who eat up the poor. I tried to get Aunt Sophia to make her man, Gillis, let up on him, but she wouldn't interfere."

"That's strange, for she is not an unkind woman-she is only hard set in certain ways which she calls her principles."

"Yes, it was rather unfortunate. You see, Mr. Glave was there."

She proceeded to give an account of Mrs. Argand's discovery of my identity.

"They didn't pay the rent, I suppose?" "Yes. But it was not his fault-just their misfortune. His wife's illness and being out of work and all-it just piled up on top of him. He had tried to get into the Union, but they held him up for some reason. He said a man named Ringsomething a walking delegate whom he used to know back in the East, got down on him, and followed him up and when he was about to get in, he turned him down. And, Dad, you've just got to give him a place."

"Wringman, possibly," said Mr. Leigh. "There's a man of that name in the city who seems to be something of a leader. He's a henchman of Coll McSheen and does his dirty work for him. He has been trying to make trouble for us for some time.

"So I have heard before," said Mr. Leigh. And that other one-how is he?" "Which one?"

"Is there any other but the Jew? I have not heard of another."

"No, he is a sinner," said Eleanor, laughing; and she went on to give an account of my episode with Pushkin, which she had learned from John Marvel, who, I may say, had done me more than justice in his relation of the matter.

"So the Count thought a team had run over him, did he?"

"Yes, that's what Mr. Marvel said."

She related a brief conversation which had taken place between her and Pushkin and Mrs. Argand, after I left, in which

Pushkin had undertaken to express his opinion of me, and she had given him to understand that she knew the true facts in the matter of our collision. All of which I learned much later.

"Well, I must say," said Mr. Leigh, "your new friend appears to have his nerve with him,' as you say."

"Dad, I never use slang," said Miss Eleanor, severely. "I am glad you have promised to give poor McNeil a place, for if you had not, I should have had to take him into the house."

"I am glad, too, if that is the case. The last one you took in was a reformed drunkard, you said, and you know what happened to him and also to my wine."

"Yes, but this one is all right." "Of course, he is."

There was joy next day in one poor little household, for McNeil, who had been dragging along through the streets for days with a weight, the heaviest the poor have to bear, bowing him down-want of workcame into his little bare room where his wife and children huddled over an almost empty stove, with a new step and a fresh note in his voice. He had gotten a place.

sages of romance attach to that diminished period, however. More than one European ambassador spent a season of repose within its walls, during the days when international law was less finical on such points than it since has grown. And it formed a residence less agreeable than the present country embassies, higher up the Bosphorus, if we may judge from the account that has come down to us of one such villeggiatura. This was written by a young Bohemian attaché who spent two years of the last decade of the sixteenth century in enforced retirement at Rouméli Hissar. His name, Wenceslas Wratislaw, with those of other prisoners, may still be seen in the stone of a little chamber high in the north tower.

To-day the castle has outlived even that period of usefulness. The true cut-throats skulk in the bare hills at the mouth of the Black Sea, while the ambassadors with the single exception, it is true, of our own— pass their summers in pleasant villas presented to them by different Sultans. As for the towers, they survive only to add their picturesqueness to the narrowest part of the Bosphorus, to flaunt ivy and even sizable trees from their battlements, and to afford a habitation to bats and carrion crows. The last vestige of military uses clinging to them is the pseudo-classic guard-house that crouches under the waterside donjon. The walls at least subserve the purpose, however, of sheltering a quarter of our village. One of our thoroughfares enters the double gate by the north tower, descends a break-neck alley of steps lattice-bordered and hung with vine, pauses between a fountain, a ruined mosque, and a monstrous mulberry tree, and finally emerges upon the quay by a low arch that was once the boat entrance to the sea tower. There is to a prying foreigner some inheritance of other days in the inhabitants of this hanging suburb. They are all of the ruling race, and there is about them something entrenched and aloof. The very dogs seem to belong to an older, a less tolerant, dispensation. The Constantinople street dog, notwithstanding the reputation that literature has attempted to fasten upon him, is in general the mildest of God's creatures. But the dog of Cut-Throat Castle is quite another character. He is a distinct reactionary, lifting up his voice against the first sign of innovation. It may be that genera

tions of surrounding walls have engendered in him the responsibilities of a private dog. At all events he resents intrusion by day, and by night is capable of the most obstinate resistance thereto.

Another memento of that older time is to be seen in the cemetery lying under the castle wall to the south. It is, perhaps, the oldest Mohammedan burying ground in Constantinople, or at least on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It certainly is the most romantic, with its jutting rocks, its ragged black cypresses, its round tower and crenelated wall, overhanging a blue so fancifully cut by Asiatic hills. It has, too, a spicy odor quite its own, an odor compounded of thyme, of resinous woods, of sea salt, and I know not what aroma of antiquity. But its most precious characteristic is the grave informality it shares with other Mohammedan cemeteries. There is nothing about it to remind one of conventional mourning-no alignment of tombs, no rectilinear laying out of walks, no trim landscape gardening. It lies unwalled to the world, the grave-stones scattered as irregularly on the steep hillside as the cyclamens that blossom there in February. Many of them have the same brightness of color. The tall narrow slabs-those of the men carved at the top into a fez or turbanare often painted, with the decorative Arabic lettering, or some quaint floral design, picked out in gold. It is another expression of the philosophy of the guard-house soldiers who so often lounge along the water, of the boy who plays his pipe under a cypress while the village goats nibble among the graves, of the veiled women who preen their silks among the rocks on summer afternoons. The whole place is interfused with that intimacy of life and death, the sense of which makes the Asiatic so much more mature than the European. The one takes the world as he finds it, while the other must childishly beat his head against stone walls. It is the source of the strength and the weakness of the two stocks.

We also love to congregate, or in Empedoclean moods to muse alone, about another old cemetery. There, on top of the steep slope behind the castle, you will often see a row of women, like love-birds contemplating the universe, or a grave family picnic. There too, especially on moonlight nights, you will not seldom hear voices up

lifted in the passionate minor which has so compelling a charm for those who know it of old, accompanied perhaps by an oboe and the strangely broken rhythm of two little drums. It is the true music for a hill top that is called the Place of Martyrs. The victims of the first skirmish that took place during the building of the castle lie there, under a file of oaks and cypresses. At the north end of the ridge a few broken gray stones are scattered among tufts of scruboak that soon give way to the rounded bareness of the hillside. At the other end newer and more honorable graves, protected by railings, attend a tekké of Bektash dervishes. This establishment was founded by a companion of the Conqueror. Mohammed gave him, as the story goes, all the land he could see from the top of the hill. The present sheikh is a descendant of the founder, but I do not believe he inherited all the land he can see. The view from the Place of Martyrs is one of the finest on the Bosphorus. I am not of the company of certain travellers in the matter of that famous strait. I have seen hills with greater nobility of outline and waters of a more satisfying blue. But when one has made all due reservations in the interest of one's private allegiances the fact remains that the Bosphorus is a charming piece of water enclosed between charmingly moulded hills. It bends below you like a narrow lake as you see it from the Place of Martyrs. The two seas are invisible, but the tops of the nearer islands in the Marmora look over the heights of Scutari, while behind them rise the mountains on the south shore of the marble sea, the Bithynian Olympus standing whitely over all.

Nothing could be more abrupt than the contrast between the slopes facing each other across the busy waterway, with all their picturesque detail of garden, roof, and minaret, and the plateau of which the Bosphorus is nothing but a crooked blue crack. From the Place of Martyrs it rolls desolately away to the west, almost without a house or a tree to break its monotony. Gullies cut it here and there. Patches of scrub-oak darken its surface. Sheep move slowly across it, looking in the distance like maggots in a texture of homespun. Otherwise you would never suppose that life existed there. As you watch the sun set across those great empty fields it is incredi

ble that somewhere beyond them tilled. lands and swarming cities are. Your impression is not of mere wildness, however. Two abandoned stone windmills on a faroff hill give the note of the impression. Such silence is the silence that follows upon the beating of many drums. You may sit upon that hilltop in evening light and drink melancholy like an intoxication, musing upon all the change and indifference of the world. Yet life lingers there still-life that neither indifference nor change, nor time nor ruin nor death can ever quite stamp out. Threads of water creep through some of the dry gullies, swelling after rain into noisy brooks. Above them hang patches of cultivation, dominated by the general brownness and bareness, but productive of excellent strawberries in the spring. That, too, is when the brown brightens for a little to green, while June colors whole tracts of hillside with butcher's broom and the wild rose. And then I have said nothing of violets, of crocuses, of I know not how many flowers, scattered along certain lonely lanes. On the edge of the village these are paved like streets and pleasantly arched with bay trees. In the bottoms of the ravines, also, they have in their season quite a sylvan air. They lead to stony trails in the open where you may meet a soldier, an Albanian shepherd, or a peasant in gay jacket and baggy blue trousers, wandering from nowhere to nowhere.

But I wander too far from our village, from that larger part of it which the exigencies of space must long ago have pushed northward out of the castle close into the underlying valley. There are those who deprecate our streets, their many steps, the manner of their paving, the irresoluteness with which they proceed to their destined ends, and the desultoriness of their illumination at night. I, however, am partial to a Gothic irregularity, and I applaud the law which admonishes us not to go abroad two hours after sunset without a lantern. We do not take the admonition too seriously, but there are chances enough of breaking our necks on moonless nights to maintain a market among us for paper lanterns. These, with the candles flaring in front of sacred tombs and the casual window lamplight so pleasingly criss-crossed by lattices, make Whistler nocturnes for us that they may never know who dwell in the glare of electricity.