son, may think them worthy of the light. I lay them by for ever. I sit and wait. I wait and watch. I watch and hope. I hear other bells besides the bells that peal on earth. My past joys, the scent of the Wulstan meadowsweet, her voice in the Cathedral choir, come back and rush on past the present to mingle with a future of peace and love, and happy summer days. I sit in the autumn firelight. The embers glow with my closing thoughts. I sit and wait, for I know that she is near. The wind is sighing without, the autumn flood is rolling down the valley, but it is summer with me. It is summer and Ruth's withered rose blooms again. I am in her presence once more. The summer of our youth and love has come back; the air is filled with the smell of honeysuckle and the snowy elder-tree. It is the summer evening of the days when first she spoke to me. There are fields of green wheat fresh and bright, and promising as hope. The water-lily slumbers on the river; the very time itself is back again; the minutest details of it are revived. The merle and the woodlark make the sweet solitude eloquent with their notes. My heart throbs in unison with Nature's own pulsation; but the soft and tender voice of Ruth Oswald is more musical to my soul than song of merle and woodlark. On that first evening of our meeting, I set her face in a framework of flowers and grasses, and all things that were beautiful. I sit in the firelight and wait. I hear the dear, familiar voice again, hear her footsteps, feel her gentle presence. My dear, dear Ruth, I am here. We meet again at last. They will toll the bell to-morrow in the valley, and say the parson is dead. Then will ye know that I have found the promised land. FINIS. AUTUMN VOICES. PIRIT of mournfulness! chill Autumn wind! "The flowers are dead, and ye must die also.” Branches that held bloom-tassels in June's day That sings to men of graves: "Alack-a-day! Man hears, and does not hum the merry ditty O wail of water! heavy lay of leaves! GUY ROSLYN. THE STORY OF THE HOSTAGES. FAITHFULLY RELATED FROM THE TESTIMONY OF EYE WITNESSES. HE "Story of the Hostages," of their sufferings and death, is a chapter in the history of the Commune that has not yet been told. In England we have had only a few glimpses of the terrible scenes that attended the end of of these noble and resigned men. The story is besides intensely dramatic; and if it shows that a picture of the Commune and its doings would not be unworthy of Mr. Carlyle's Salvator Rosa-like pencil, the same reason proves abundantly that the Commune movement is barbarous and brutal enough to form a chapter in the old French Revolution of 1793. All the bloodthirsty and fiendish incidents have been faithfully reproduced, and, happily, also the heroic virtues of patience and courage by which those atrocities were encountered. In many a window along the Boulevards are to be seen little terra cotta busts, done with singular spirit and skill; and the print shop windows exhibit whole lines of ecclesiatical portraits, an unaccustomed spectacle in Paris, where they usurp the place of notorious demireps. These are likenesses of those who are rather melodramatically labelled "victimes;" in short, are dismal reminders of that piteous story of the innocent hostages, whose mournful fate, from the number of surrounding atrocities, has scarcely excited the sympathy and horror it merits. In the grotesque and hideous pantomime of the Commune, this episode alone has a pathetic dignity, and the figures of the innocent stand out against the flaming background of burning Paris. Their story has not yet been told consecutively, and we shall now attempt to follow it out. It is only by turning over the newspapers, pamphlets, caricatures, and photographs of this strange era, that we can get even a conception of the extraordinary state of things that prevailed during those nine weeks from March the 18th to May the 24th. The members of the Commune themselves, with their theatrical dignities of generals, colonels, delegates, ministers of finance, installed at the great Government Offices-where they held orgies-together with their wild, half-dressed, half-drilled soldiers, seem to be figures out of Callot's VOL. VII., N.S. 1871. 3 E or Goya's pictures. Some, during these days of whirl and delirium, could not resist being photographed in their green-room finery, in comic military dresses, and girt about with sashes. Their faces, too, corresponded. Some had a perfect circus air, others a shaggy, sans culotte bearing, while others, again, were of a bearded, burly type, such as we sometimes find among French physicians. But there were two who had a special and direct connection with the tragedy we are about to describe-namely, Ferré and Raoul Rigault. Both these men were, curious to say, of the same type; each with a dark beard and moustache, and each wearing those French "pinch-nose" glasses, which imparted a "mince" and dandified air, in grotesque contrast to the ferocious character of their creed. Both were very young. Ferré was but five-and-twenty, and Raoul Rigault only a little older. Again the behaviour of these men—their taste for blood, their cruelty, their cold mercilessness-calls up, in quite a vivid way, that no description could have realised, the figures of the demons who figured in the great Revolution. It helps us to understand the "sea-green incorruptible" and his quiet, refined manner; while his eye quested blood. Indeed, all the antics of these men of 1871-their decrees, burnings, levelling of columns, and the rest of their awful deeds, all crowded into a few weeks-reproduced by instinct, and without any purpose of imitation, the former era. But where the likeness was carried out only too faithfully, was in the thirst for PRIESTS' BLOOD. This, indeed, seems to be a motto of all Revolution; the first attack is made on the clergy; the Jesuits and curés are driven out or slaughtered. And this is not a mere devouring of the shepherds before beginning with the sheep; but a sort of morbid fury, a grudge of years' standing. For these unhappy victims are helpless to interfere with their purposes. But this rabid phobia should surely be considered a compliment to these good men, though one paid at the expense of life itself. Rigault was "Delegate of Public Safety," as it was called in the pompous jargon of the Commune, and he soon contrived to be appointed to the office of Procureur or Prosecutor for the Commune, and later to that of Chief of Police. With such powers, this man took a fiendish pleasure in denouncing and arresting, not those who might be opposed to his party, but those to whom he had an instinct of dislike. In his friend Ferré he found an associate of a congenial turn of mind. These two men must be held responsible for the cold-blooded murders that followed. The eyes of both turned eagerly to the "cassocks" then walking about Paris, with plenty to do. On the 7th of April, "the Hostage law" was voted, which was to the effect that every one suspected of holding relations with Versailles should be brought before a jury, and, if found guilty, detained in prison as a hostage; so that if any prisoner were put to death by the Versaillists, three of these hostages should be executed in reprisal. Fortified by this decree, they could set to work with effect; for every person who did not sympathise with them might, ex officio, be suspected of holding relations with Versailles. In a Mr. Leighton passed by the Rue St. Honoré about three or four o'clock one morning, when he noticed a group of the ill-fed and grotesquely dressed Federals standing as if waiting for someone. moment a door opened in another street, and a man issuing forth hurried away in a very alarmed fashion. Presently the door was opened again, and two soldiers burst out in pursuit, the man was caught, dragged in, and the door shut again. This was the Abbé Deguerry, the well-known Vicar of the Madeleine, who was immensely popular and loved by both rich and poor. His very air was engaging; a fine tall handsome old man, full of activity and vigour, with a singularly open and honest face and a quick and lively expression-a fresh colour, and a cloud of wiry silver hair on each side of his head. He was eloquent and witty, was recherché in the salons of the "swell" congregation who attended his fashionable church, but was far more at home in the squalid quarters of St. Eustache, where he had formerly been vicar. His charity was unbounded; he kept nothing for himself. Finally, he had several times declined a Bishopric. Once he had been persuaded to accept that of Marseilles, but a few hours later he repented. "No," he said; "I belong to the Madeleine. I shall stay there, and die there." To have selected such a man for a victim shows not merely a fiendish hatred of such goodness, but a dull stupidity and ignorance that would make their cause for ever odious. With this good man was also arrested the Archbishop of Paris; President Bonjean; the Archbishop's second vicar, the Abbé Allard, who was also a member of the International Society for the Relief of the Wounded; Father Ducoudray, Rector of the Seminary of St. Geneviève; and Father Clerc, a Jesuit. These names are familiar to us from their unhappy notoriety; but many more-priests, monks, bankers, lawyers-were seized and thrown into prison. The Archbishop had received friendly warnings; but he refused to depart or conceal himself, saying that the post of the shepherd was with his flock. The Delegate Regère, whom the writer saw at the Versailles trial |