of heaven, the sound of two pens could be heard. One was the Englishman's, writing a report to headquarters saying that the increase of crime must be checked by reprisals, the other bidding the inspector put on the bearer as a Government swimmer.

"For signature, Huzoor," came a deferential voice, and the still-busy pen shifted itself to the shiny paper laid beside it, and the dark, keen, kindly eyes looked up once more for half a second. Well, good luck to you. I hope you'll kill him, whoever

he is."

66

"By the help of God, Huzoor, by the help of God!"

Which was it, Hussan or Husayn, who in the growing dusk walked up and down the shaly glacis below the long cluster of Sitâna, watching the opposite bank with the eyes of a lynx for each stone of vantage, each shallow whence a few yards' start might be gained? Which was it, Husayn or Hussan, who in the same dusk paced up and down the low bank on the other side watching in his turn, with untiring eyes, for the quicker curve of the current where a bold swimmer might by one swift venture drift down faster to the calmer water, and so have a second or two in which to regain breath ere the fight began ? What matters it whether the panther was on the western bank and the leopard on the eastern? They were two wild beasts pacing up and down, up and down, with their feet upon the water's edge; up and down, up and down, even when the moon rose and their shadows showed more distinctly than they did themselves, for the oil upon their limbs caught the light keenly like the glistening shale and the glistening wet sand at their feet. Up and down, up and down, they paced, in the stillness and the peace, with only the noise of the rushing river, slumberously, monotonously

insistent; up and down, up and down till the cry of the Muezzim at dawn came echoing over the water: Prayer is more than sleep! Prayer is more than sleep! Ay! more even than sleeplessness with sheer murder in heart and brain. So peace fell between those two while they turned towards Mecca and prayed, for what, God knows. Perhaps once more the real spiritual Kaaba was what they saw with the eyes of the flesh; that flat-roofed house just beginning to blush rosy in the earliest rays of the rising sun; more probably it was not, since they had passed through love to hatred. And then, prayers over, murder was over also for the time, since they could not court detection by daylight.

They are wondrous keen on the other side, despite the moon," said the elders of the village and the officials over the way, alike; "but there is no fear our watchman will be taken at a disadvantage. He is there from dusk till dawn."

"Ay!" replied wiseacres on either side; "but when the moon wanes, what then?"

It came even before that, came with a great purple mass of thunderclouds making the Black Mountain beyond the Mahabân deserve its name, and drawing two pair of eyes, one on either side of the stream, into giving hopeful glances at the slow majestic march of gloom across the sky. It was dusk an hour sooner, dawn an hour later than usual that night and day, so there was plenty of time for sheer murder before prayertime. And as there was no storm, no thunder after all, but only the heavy clouds hanging like a curtain over the moon, a faint splash into the rushing river might have been heard some time in the night, followed by another. Then after a while a cry broke the brooding silence above the hurrying whisper below, the cry of

faith, and fate, and fight: Allah-hoAkhbar! Allah-ho-hukk! Perhaps it was the Muezzim again, proclaiming out of due time that God is Might and Right; or maybe it was those two swimmers in the river as they caught sight of each other in the whirling water. If so, Hussan struck upwards from the water, no doubt, and Husayn, mindful of advice, followed suit; and so the six black heads must have gone drifting down stream peacefully, save for the hatred in the two faces glaring at each other, since the river hid their blows decorously. But there was no trace of them on it far or near when the sun rose over the eastern hills, and the big shepherd, singing a guttural lovesong, came leaping down the stony path towards Sitâna with a bunch

of red rhododendrons behind his

ear.

Some days afterwards, however, the native official at the Police Station rode over to see his superior, and reported with a smirk that he had seen through the telescope a great weeping and wailing at Sitâna. Two of their swimmers had apparently been killed in fair fight, for their bodies had been brought up for burial from the backwater further down the river; and as the new man, whom the Huzoor had appointed, had either absconded or been killed also, that just made the proportion what his Honour had laid down for future guidance, two to one.

"H'm!" said John Nicholson half to himself; "I wonder which of the two was really the better man."

THE other day as I,-a country doctor in a remote part of Cornwall,— was driving home from one of the longest rounds on which my profession calls me, I occupied myself in thinking of the vast difference which I see between my rustic neighbours and the inhabitants of more thickly peopled regions of England. I could indeed without much difficulty make out an excellent case for concluding that this difference is in some respects to the advantage of the Cornish; but putting such controversy aside, I greatly doubt whether it can be understood by any save those who have lived among these people how strangely their thoughts and actions are mingled with the traditions and superstitions of the past. Dead faiths and dead beliefs lie about this country side like withered leaves in autumn. My feet rustle in them wherever I go; and from day to day I encounter some hoary fragment of antiquity brought forth from a memory where the tradition of centuries has planted it, and displayed not as a curiosity, but as the ground of some important action.

It was not merely a wandering fancy which set my thoughts in this train as my horse trotted homewards across the breezy down. A singular instance had been presented to me that very afternoon of the amazing durability which is sometimes possessed by the formula of an old belief, keeping the husk in existence long years after the kernel has withered away. I had been visiting a patient at a farm high on the border of the moor; an old woman, the widow of a freeholder, and coming herself of a family whose record in the parish where she

dwelt could be traced back almost to the first pages of the church registers. My patient leads a lonely life in her distant farm, and is generally eager for such news as I can give her on the days of my periodical visits. My chief piece of intelligence on the day in question was that a relation of my own, whom she had once seen, was about to be married. The old woman was greatly interested, and asked the name of the bride. On hearing that it was Margaretta, she at once assured me that was a lucky name, and begged me most earnestly to let the bridegroom know how to reap the full advantage of the luck; he must, it seemed, pluck a daisy on the eve of the marriage, draw it three times through the wedding ring, and repeat each time, very slowly, the words, "Saint Margaretta or her nobs."

But what, I asked, did this mystic formula mean? To my ears it sounded like pure gibberish, and I hinted as much. But my patient, though quite unable to assign any definite meaning to the words, harped always back to the conviction that they were lucky, and pleaded this so earnestly that I should have given her real offence if I had seemed to doubt it. Promising therefore that my relation should be duly warned how to secure his luck, I took my leave, wondering rather idly whether the nonsensical words had originally any meaning at all. It was not until far on my homeward journey that it flashed suddenly into my mind that the words were a prayer, "Sancta Margaretta, ora pro nobis," a genuine Latin intercession, handed down from Roman Catholic time. Who knows with what rapture of devotion in days

long past Saint Margaret's prayer had been repeated in that very farmstead by the lips of men and women taught to feel a personal devotion to the Saint; and though now even the holy character of the words is forgotten, yet the fact that they have been kept in memory through so many generations, in never so corrupt a form, proves the strength of the feeling which once sanctified them, showing that in some one's mind the prayer was stored up not to be forgotten, with a lingering trust that it would bring a blessing yet.

It was, as I said, this rather striking incident which turned my thoughts to the strange empire which the traditions of the past exercise over the lives of the people in this country; and my mind reverted to a scene which I had witnessed a few months before, the like of which can very rarely have been seen outside Cornwall.

Driving home in the dark one wintry evening after a long day's work, I saw a little group of people entering a solitary cottage by the roadside. The woman who passed in first was in tears. I knew her well; she was the tenant of the cottage and wife of a sailor whose ship was long overdue. Another woman, who seemed to be trying to console her, passed in with her, while the third member of the party, an old fisherman with whom I have held many curious conversations both before and since that evening, remained standing by the roadside. He greeted me, and I pulled up my horse. Any fresh trouble there, Peter?" I asked. "Ez, zur," he answered; "poor Jan's drooned." "That's bad news indeed," Then you have heard that the ship is really lost?" "Naw, zur," was the reply; "oonly poor Jan." “I don't understand you,” I said; “is the ship safe then?" "Uz doan't knaw about the ship, zur. Betty she said

said I.

Ι

hur couldn't goo on like this waitin' and waitin', and not knawin' whether her man was dead or alive. So she went and called 'n on the shore,down by the watter," he added, seeing that I did not understand him." Well, and what happened? Did you go with her?" "Ez, zur," he answered in his slow way; "and Tamson Rickard over to Polmorth, and Betty her stood at the edge of the watter, crying out, 'Oh, Jan, my man, my good man;' till Tamson catches her by the arm and tells her to hush; an' then, just very low, we heard 'n answer." The old man shook his head and stepped back to allow me to proceed. There was something in his manner so solemn and dignified as effectually to check any disposition to pry further. He had the aspect of one who had indeed been present at an actual communing with the dead. The widow called her husband; they all heard the spirit answer; so much might be told, but what remained was sacred to the bereaved woman's grief. I drove or after a few words of sympathy; and as I followed the coast road beneath which the winter surges were beating heavily in the darkness, and glanced out at the line of foam across which the drowned sailor had answered the cry of his desolate wife, I began to wonder whether there might not be truth in some things, at least, across which we have long since drawn the bar of incredulity.

Near the little town in which I dwell a tidal river flows down to the sea through a deep and wide valley, or rather a gorge in the hills. The fresh-water stream winds like a narrow riband through the wide expanse of sand which fills the bottom of the valley; and at low tide footpassengers cross the water on a bridge consisting of a single plank, while vehicles of all kinds drive through a ford close by. At the proper time

this is safe enough; but when the tide begins to flow, the salt water races through the gorge with astonishing speed; the little foot-bridge is submerged, and the ford, even at the first coming of the tide, is easily missed.

The river has an evil reputation. Countless disasters have occurred there; and the souls of drowned men and women are perpetually flitting to and fro across the waste of sand, in the guise of little birds, pointing out to the traveller where the footing is secure. So runs one of the traditions ; and indeed the valley is infested by flocks of birds. But there is another sign of warning in this river-bed, especially by night and when the salt water is streaming fast over the sandy flats. Then as the wayfarer pauses in doubt whether he can reach the foot-bridge, or the farmer in his gig hesitates before dashing into that wide stream which is fast drowning the ford, while his mare snorts and plunges as the water ripples round her feet in the darkness, suddenly a hoarse shriek resounds close beside him, a wild inarticulate cry, which the least superstitious man might interpret as a note of warning. It is the crake, and for many miles there is no man, woman, or child who, having once heard that scream, will not turn and go five miles round rather than cross the river-bed that day. Whence the warning comes, if indeed it be one, I know not.

Some say

the shriek is from a bird; others again philosophise about noises in the wet sand; while most of the peasants can tell a wild story about a wicked man who perished at the crossing in the endeavour to bring a priest to the bedside of a dying woman. His one good deed rescued his soul from utter damnation, and won for him the privilege of flying for ever about the scene of his act of self-sacrifice, gifted

with the power of warning others in this wild way against the danger which proved fatal to himself.

There is an easy wisdom in smiling at such stories when one reads them in a warm well-lighted room; but I have not always felt them ludicrous while driving down into the rivervalley on a winter evening, chilled and wearied by a long day's work. On such a night, when the hills are shrouded with vapour, the very sound of the surf beating on the rocks is enough to fill a man's fancy with strange thoughts; and I take no shame in admitting that it is sometimes an effort to drive the traditions of the place from my mind. But enough of these uncanny matters; I have brighter pages in my note-book, and as I turn them over many a halfforgotten incident starts to life again.

It would probably surprise many good people who are accustomed to put confidence in their doctor, to know with how many others that confidence has to be shared in Cornwall. White witches, gipsies, wandering quacks, all dispute my pre-eminence, while my patients play off one of us against another with inexhaustible skill, or shall I say impudence? This has long ceased to wound my vanity. I can tell the story of my old friend Mary without

a pang.

Mary, let me say, was on the whole the most contented person I ever knew. She dwelt in a little hovel beside the open road which cuts across the downs, a structure looking as if it had been thrown together hastily to shelter sheep, and so unfit for a human habitation that I used to wonder that it was not condemned by

the local surveyor. Mary suffered

from heart-disease; neither my skill nor the whole demonology could make her any better, or save her from