while I was down on the trench line, I saw a big puff of smoke rise from the the summit of the hill near Malinta, about four thousand yards to the north. In a second came the tell-tale rumble, like the sound made by a train crossing a bridge, and at the same time a loud report was borne to our ears. When we first saw the puff of smoke it was thought to be the result of an accidental explosion, but the sound of the coming shell told us what to expect, and in a couple of seconds we saw it come sweeping down in a beautiful curve. It struck fifty yards in front of that portion of the trench occupied by Company E, threw half a wagon-load of earth into the air, and exploded with a noise like the report of a young cannon, while what looked like a general assortment of shelf hardware flew in all directions. The report had brought almost every man in the regiment to his feet, but the way the men of Company E dived to cover when the thing struck was worth going to see. It was subsequently learned that the shot was fired from a Krupp breech-loading rifled coast-defence gun, which after what must have been infinite labor had been brought from either Cavite or Subig Bay. It was served by Spanish artillerymen who were prisoners among the Filipinos, and who were compelled to do the work. It had been aimed at the Higgins house, known to be General MacArthur's head-quarters, and was an excellent shot, being in perfect line and less than a hundred and fifty yards short.

During the first day's fighting, as has been told, we had been fired at a number of times by a good-sized gun of antique type, and one day a shell from a Nordenfeldt fieldgun had landed among us while in the Caloocan trenches, but had not exploded, but we were greatly astonished to receive the attentions of so large a weapon as this one. We were still discussing the matter when another cloud of smoke rose at Malinta. This shot was perfect on elevation, but a few yards to the right. It cleared the trench by only a few feet and exploded when it struck. The thing was becoming interesting, and all eyes were riveted on Malinta. After a few moments came the third, and poorest shot of all, it being far to the right and with too much elevation. It struck about half-way between the trench and the church, and did not explode, but sailed up into the air and

tumbling end over end passed a hundred feet over the roof of the church, and fell to the south of it. A number of the men went out and brought it in. It was an elongated projectile about six inches in diameter, and weighed about eighty pounds. The gun from which these shots were fired was dug up in the streets of Malolos after the capture of that place.

In the meantime Captain Edgar Russell, chief signal officer of the division, had been wig-wagging from the church tower certain angles, elevations, and other scientific stuff to a couple of naval vessels, the Monadnock and Charleston, if I am not mistaken, lying off Malabon, and soon puffs of smoke rose from them as they began to take an interest in the proceedings. The distance was great, but the shooting was beautiful, especially when it is considered that the target was not in sight. The shells struck all about the offending gun, blowing big craters in the ground as they exploded, and we heard no more from it. For months we took it for granted that the navy fire had either disabled the gun or made the gunners afraid to serve it, but the Spaniard, Segovia, who was serving as an officer with the insurgents, and who was present at the time, told me more than a year later that the third shot had broken the elevating gear of the gun and that they were trying to remove it when the navy opened, the shells coming so close that everybody ran from the piece.

Soon stories began to drift in to us to the effect that twenty-four men had been killed by a shell at Malinta, and our field artillerymen began to pride themselves that one of their long-range efforts had potted a group of insurgents. But this same Segovia gave me the facts when I came to know him, and his statements were corroborated by Filipinos. According to him, the day after the occurrences just described a number of men of the Neuva Ecija Battalion, from the province of that name, dug out of the ground an unexploded navy shell, which from the description given me must have been of either ten-inch or eight-inch calibre. They were unable to carry it, but managed to stand it on end, point down, and a large crowd gathered about, among them General Llanera and his adjutant, Segovia. Finally most of the group dispersed, their curiosity satisfied, but a considerable number remained, and by much

She simply could not have borne it. To tell the story is part of the melancholy freedom her death has bestowed on me.

By the time you have read my apology you will have remembered, probably with some disgust, the Upcher "horror." I am used to it, but I can still wince at it. I have always been pleased to recognize that life, as my friends lived it, was not in the least like the newspapers. Not to be like the newspapers was as good a test of caste as another. Perhaps it is well for a man to realize, once in his time, that at all events the newspapers are a good deal like life. In any case, when you have known fairly well a man sentenced and executed for murder-and on such evidence!—you never feel again like saying that "one doesn't know" people who sue for breach of promise.

After all, every one of us knows people who accept alimony. But I've enough grudge against our newspapers to be glad that my true tale comes too late for even the Orb to get an "extra" out of it. The Orb made enough, in its time, out of the Upchers. On the day when the charwoman gave her evidence against Filippo Upcher, the last copies of the evening edition sold in the New York streets for five dollars each. I have said enough to recall the case to you, and enough, I hope, to explain that it's the kind of thing I am very little used to dealing with. "Oblige me by referring to the files," if you want the charwoman's evidence. Now I may as well get to my story. I want it, frankly, off my hands. It has been pushing, for a year, into my "Italian Interludes"; thrusts itself in, asking if it isn't, forsooth, as good, for emotion, as anything in the Cinquecento. And so, God knows, it is . . . but the Cinquecento charwomen have luckily been obliterated from history.

I knew Filippo Upcher years ago; knew him rather well, in a world where the word "friend" is seldom correctly used. We were "pals," rather, I should think: ate and drank together, at Upcher's extraordinary hours, and didn't often see each other's wives. It was Upcher's big period. London and New York went, docile enough, to see him act Othello. He used to make every one weep over Desdemona, I know, and that is more than Shakespeare unassisted has always managed. Perhaps if

he hadn't done Othello so damnably well, with such a show of barbaric passion . . . It was my "little" period, if I may say it; when I was having the inevitable try at writing plays. I soon found that I could not write them, but meanwhile I lived for a little in the odd flare of the theatric world. Filippo Upcher-he always stuck, even in play-bills, you remember, to the absurd name—I had met in my Harvard days, and I found him again at the very heart of that flare. The fact that his mother was an Italian whose maiden name had been brushed across with a title, got him into certain drawing-rooms that his waistcoats would have kept him out of. She helped him out, for example, in Boston-where "baton sinister" is considered, I feel sure, merely an ancient heraldic term. Rachel Upcher, his wife, I used to see occasionally. She had left the stage before she married Upcher, and I fancy her tense renditions of Ibsen were the last thing that ever attracted him. My first recollection of her is in a pose plastique of passionate regret that she had never, in her brief career, had an opportunity to do "Ghosts". "Rosmersholm," I believe, was as far as she ever went. She had beauty, of the incongruous kind that makes you wonder when, where, and how the woman stole the mask. She is absolutely the only person I ever met who gave you the original of the much-imitated "mysterious" type. She was eternally mysterious-and, every day, quite impossible. It wasn't to be expected that poor Evie should care to see much of her, and I never put the question that Mrs. Upcher seemed to be always wanting to refuse to answer. The fact is that the only time I ever took poor Evie there, Filippo and his wife quarrelled so vulgarly and violently that we came away immediately after dinner. It would have been indecent to stay. You were sure that he would beat her as soon as you left, but also that before he had hurt her much, she would have cut his head open with a plate. Very much, you see, in the style of the newspapers. I saw Filippo at the club we both had the habit of, and on his Anglo-Saxon days liked him fairly well. When his Italian blood rose beneath his clear skin, I would have piled up any number of fictitious engagements to avoid him. He was unspeakable, then: unappeasable, vitriolic, scarce human. You felt,

on such days, that he wanted his entrée smeared with blood, and you lunched at another table so that at least the blood shouldn't be yours. I used to fancy whimsically that some ancestress of his had been a housemaid to the Borgias, and had got into rather distinguished "trouble." But she must have been a housemaid. I did not, however, say this to any one during the trial. For I was sure that his passion was perfectly unpractical, and that he took action only in his mild moments.

I found, as I say, that I could not write plays. My wife and I went abroad for some years. We saw Upcher act once in London, but I didn't even look him up. That gives you the measure of our detachment. I had quite forgotten him in the succeeding years of desultory delightful roaming over southern Europe. There are alike so much to remember and so much to forget, between Pirene and Lourdes! But the first headlines of the first newspaper that I bought on the dock when we disembarked reluctantly in New York, presented him to me again. It was all there: the "horror," the "case," the vulgar, garish tragedy. We had landed in the thick of it. It took me some time to grasp the fact that a man whom I had occasionally called by his first name was being accused of that kind of thing. I don't need to dot my i's. You had all seen Filippo Upcher act, and you all, during his trial, bought the Orb. I read it myself: every sickening column that had been, with laborious speed, jotted down in the court-room. The evidence made one feel that, if this was murder, a man who merely shoots his wife through the heart need not be considered a criminal at all. It was the very scum of crime. Rachel Upcher had disappeared after a violent quarrel with her husband, in which threats overheard-had been freely uttered. He could give no plausible account of her. Then the whole rotten mass of evidence-fit only for a rag-picker to handle began to come in. The mutilated body disinterred; the fragments of marked clothing; the unused railway ticket-but I really cannot go into it. I am not an Orb reporter. The evidence was only circumstantial, but it was, alack! almost better than direct testimony. Filippo was perfectly incoherent in defence, though he of course pleaded "not guilty." He had, for

that significant scene-he, Filippo Upcher! -no stage presence.

The country re-echoed the sentence, as it had re-echoed every shriek of the evidence, from Atlantic to Pacific. The jury was out five hours; would have been out only as many minutes, if it had not been for one Campbell, an undertaker, who had some doubts as to the sufficiency of the "remains" disinterred to make evidence. But the marked underclothing alone made their fragmentariness negligible. Campbell was soon convinced of that. It was confused enough, in all conscience, he told Upcher's and my friend, Ted Sloan, later-but he guessed the things the charwoman overheard were enough to convict any man; he'd stick to that. Of course, the prosecuting attorney hadn't rested his case on the imperfect state of the body, anyhow-had just brought it in to show how nasty it had been all round. It didn't even look very well for him to challenge medical experts, though a body that had been buried was a little more in his line than it was in theirs, perhaps. And any gentleman in his profession had had, he might say, more practical experience than people who lectured in colleges. He hadn't himself though, any call from superior technical knowledge, to put spokes in the wheel of justice. He guessed that was what you'd call a quibble. And he was crazy to get home-Mrs. C. was expecting her first, any time along. Sloan said the man seemed honest enough; and he was quite right—the chain of circumstance was, alas! complete. Upcher was convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to death. He didn't appeal— wouldn't, in spite of his counsel, and Sloan's impassioned advice: “Give 'em a run for their money, Filippo. Be a sport, anyhow!"

"Lord, man, all juries are alike," was the response. "They've no brains. I wouldn't have the ghost of a show, and I'm not going through that racket again, and make a worse fool of myself on the stand another time."

"But if you don't, they'll take it you've owned up."

"Not necessarily, after they've read my will. I've left Rachel the 'second-best bed.' There wasn't much else. She's got more than I ever had. No, Sloan, a man

must be guilty to want to appeal. No innocent man would go through that hell twice. I want to get out and be quiet." The only appeal he did make was not such as to give Mr. Campbell any retrospective qualms of conscience. The request was never meant to get out, but, like so many other things marked "private," it did. His petition was for being allowed to act a certain number of nights before his execution. He owed frightful sums, but, as he said, no sums, however frightful, could fail to be raised by such a device.

"It would kill your chances of a reprieve, Filippo," Sloan said he told him.

"Reprieve?" Filippo had laughed. "Why, it would prove me guilty. It would turn all the evidence pale. But think of the box-office receipts. There would have to be a platoon of police deadheading in the front rows, of course. But even at that!"

Sloan came away a little firmer for circumstantial evidence than he had been before. He wouldn't see Filippo again; wouldn't admit that it was a good epigram; wouldn't even admit that it was rather fine of Filippo to be making epigrams at all. Most people agreed with him; thought Upcher shockingly cynical. But of course people never take into account the difference there is between being convicted and pleading guilty. Is it not de rigueur that, in those circumstances, a man's manner should be that of innocence? Filippo's flight has always seemed to me a really fine one. But I do not know of any man one could count on to distil from it the pure attar of honesty.

We had gone straight to my wife's family in New England, on arriving. Until I saw Sloan, I had got my sole information about Upcher from the newspapers. Sloan's account of Filippo's way of taking it roused my conscience. If a man, after all that, could show any decency, one owed him something. I decided, without consulting my wife about it, to go over to New York and see Filippo, myself. Evie was so done up by the thought of having once dined with the Upchers, that I could hardly have broken my intention to her. I told her, of course, after I returned, but to know beforehand might have meant a real illness for her. I should have spared her all of it, had it not seemed to me, at the moment,

my duty to go. The interview was not easy to manage, but I used Evie's connections shamelessly, and in the end the arrangement was made. I have always been glad that I went, but I don't know anything more nerve-racking than to visit a condemned criminal whose guilt you cannot manage to doubt. Only Filippo's proposal (of which Sloan had told me) to act long enough to pay his debts, made me do it. I still persist in thinking it magnificent of Filippo, though I don't pretend there wasn't, in his desire, some lingering lust of good report. The best he could hope for was to be forgotten; but he would naturally rather be forgotten as Hamlet than as Filippo Upcher.

Upcher was not particularly glad to see me, but he made the situation as little strained as possible. He did no violent protesting, no arraigning of law and justice. If he had perhaps acted according to the dictates of his hypothetical ancestress, he at least spoke calmly enough. He seemed to regard himself less as unjustly accused than as unjustly executed, if I may say so: he looked on himself as a dead man, and his calamity was irretrievable. The dead may judge, but I fancy they don't shriek. At all events, Upcher didn't. A proof of his having cast hope carelessly over his shoulder was his way of speaking of his wife. He didn't even take the trouble to use the present tense; to stress, as it were, her flesh-and-blood reality. It was "Rachel was," never "Rachel is”—as we sometimes use the past tense to indicate that people have gone out of our lives by their own fault. The way in which he spoke of her was not tactful. A franker note of hatred I've never except perhaps onceheard struck. Occasionally he would pull himself up, as if he remembered that the dead are our natural creditors for kindly speech.

"She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there's no point in going into it now."

I rather wanted him to go into it: not might Heaven forbid!—to confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried frankness.

"I think I'll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her."

He nodded. "She was poison; and I am poisoned. That's the whole thing."