indeed, but not culpable in the last degree; the water in the ink, the commonplaces, the ineffectual sentiments-these, to my unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, I should have pleaded guilty in the state of humiliation to which I was reduced; but things were better than they might have been. I was flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance would be in my favor: so many years of labor—such and such cheques received from my publisher. Here at least I held myself safe, and I was in good hope that I might scrape through. The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there appeared an interminable vista of creatures - creatures of all kinds from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They were those which in the course of my life I had devoured, either in part or whole, to sustain my unconscionable carcass. There they stood in lines with solemn and reproachful faces,-oxen and calves, sheep and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants, grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings. Every one of them had come up to bear witness against their murderer; out of sea and river had come the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These had been my wages. this enormous cost had my existence been maintained. A stag spoke for the rest: "We all," he said, "were sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to produce the miserable bits of printed paper which are all that he has to show for himself. Our lives were dear to us. In meadow and wood, in air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven and the sparkling waves. We were not worth much; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder at the judgment, though we shall

At

withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves we say freely that we have long watched him,- him and his fellows, and we have failed to see in what the superiority of the human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most destructive, and unhappily the longest lived of all carnivorous beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied, he kills us for his mere amusement."

The oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the fishes flapped their tails. I, for myself, stood mute and selfcondemned. What answer but one was possible? Had I been myself on the bench I could not have hesitated. The fatal sentence of condemnation was evidently about to be uttered, when the scene became indistinct, there was a confused noise, a change of condition, a sound of running feet and of many voices. I awoke. I was again in the railway carriage; the door was thrown open; porters entered to take our things. We stepped out upon the platform. We were at the terminus for which we had been originally destined. Carriages and cabs were waiting; tall powdered footmen flew to the assistance of the duke and duchess. The station-master was standing hat in hand, and obsequiously bowing; the minister's private secretary had come to meet his right honorable chief with the red dispatch box, knowing the impatience with which it was waited for. The duke shook hands with the archbishop before he drove away. "Dine with us tomorrow?" he said. "I have had a very singular dream. You shall be my Daniel and interpret it for me." The archbishop regretted infinitely that he must deny himself the honor; his presence was required at the Conference. "I too have dreamt,» he said; "but with your Grace and me the realities of this world are too serious to leave us leisure for the freaks of imagination.”

HENRY B. FULLER

(1859-)

EW ENGLAND blood reveals itself in certain characteristics of Mr. Henry B. Fuller's fiction, though his grandfather took root in Chicago even after its incorporation in 1840. Born in the "windy city," of prosperous merchant stock, he is of the intellectual race of Margaret Fuller; and the saying of one of his characters, "Get the right kind of New England face, and you can't do much better," shows his liking for the transplanted qualities which began the good fortunes of the Great West.

Family councils decreed that he should fill an important inherited place in the business world; but temperament was too strong for predestination. He might have been an architect, he might have been a musician, had he not turned out a novelist. But a creative artist he was constrained by nature to become. His first story, unacknowledged at first, and entitled 'The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,' attracted little notice until it fell by chance under the eye of Professor Norton of Cambridge, who sent it with a kindly word to Lowell. This fine critic wrote a cordial letter of praise to the author, and the book was republished by the Century Company of New York in 1892 and widely read. The Chatelaine of La Trinité,' his next venture, appeared as a serial in the Century Magazine during the same year. Both of these stories have a European background; in both a certain remoteness and romantic quality predominates, and both have little in common with this workaday world.

To the amazement of his public, Mr. Fuller's next book-published as a serial in Harper's Weekly, during the summer of the World's Fair, and called 'The Cliff-Dwellers - pictured Chicago in its most sordid and utilitarian aspect. King Money sat on the throne, and the whole community paid tribute. The intensity of the struggle for existence, the push of competition, the relentlessness of the realism of the book, left the reader almost breathless at the end, uncertain whether to admire the force of the story-teller or to lament his mercilessness.

In 1895 appeared With the Procession,' another picture of Chicago social life, but painted with a more kindly touch. The artist still delineates what he sees, but he sees more truly, because more sympathetically. The theme of the story is admirable, and it is carried out with a half humorous and wholly serious thoroughness. This

theme is the total reconstruction of the social concepts of an oldfashioned, rich, stolid, commercial Chicago family, in obedience to the decree of the modernized younger son and daughters. The process is more or less tragic, though it is set forth with an artistic lightness of touch. With the Procession is such a story as might happen round the corner in any year. Herr Sienkiewicz's Polanyetskis are not more genuinely "children of the soil" than Mr. Fuller's Marshalls and Bateses. In these later stories he seems to be asking himself, in most serious words, what is to be the social outcome of the great industrial civilization of the time, and to demand of his readers that they too shall fall to thinking.

AT THE HEAD OF THE MARCH

From With the Procession. Copyright 1894 by Henry B. Fuller, and reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers, publishers, New York

ELL, here goes!" said Jane half aloud, with her foot on the lowest of the glistening granite steps.

"WELL

The steps

led up to the ponderous pillared arches of a grandiose and massive porch; above the porch a sturdy and rugged balustrade half intercepted the rough-faced glitter of a vast and variegated façade; and higher still, the morning sun shattered its beams over a tumult of angular roofs and towering chimneys.

"It is swell, I declare!" said Jane, with her eye on the wrought-iron work of the outer doors, and the jewels and bevels of the inner ones.

"Where is the thingamajig, anyway?" she inquired of herself. She was searching for the door-bell, and she fell back on her own rustic lingo in order to ward off the incipient panic caused by this overwhelming splendor. "Oh, here it is! There!" She gave a push. "And now I'm in for it." She had decided to take the richest and best known and most fashionable woman on her list to start with; the worst over at the beginning, she thought, the rest would follow easily enough.

"I suppose the 'maid' will wear a cap and a silver tray," she observed further. "Or will it be a gold one, with diamonds around the edge?"

The door-knob turned from within. "Is Mrs. Bates » she began.

The door opened half-way. A grave, smooth-shaven man appeared; his chin and upper lip had the mottled smudge that

shows in so many of those conscientious portraits of the olden time.

Then

"Gracious me!" said the startled Jane to herself. She dropped her disconcerted vision to the door-mat. she saw that the man wore knee-breeches and black-silk stockings. "Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live. I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in this town!"

She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her handbag.

The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all. Some of these brought artbooks in monthly parts; others brought polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy; few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.

"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, “I knew I should get at it eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly goodwill: she acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him into the concession that she herself was nothing less.

The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was permitted to pass the gate.

She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse