the Russian warships in the harbor so that they can't escape."

In a flash both men understood.

The air at Chefoo had been thick with rumors of repulse. The grand assault of Nogi's splendid army on the second line of the Port Arthur defences had been hurled back in a chaos of ruin and slaughter. The Baltic Fleet had sailed for the East. The Vladivostock squadron was out again seeking juncture with the Port Arthur battleships. The previous heroic attempts of the Japanese to choke the narrow fairway had been thwarted by the searchlights, and had withered away under the guns of the Russian batteries, aided by the frustrating tideeddies and sweeps of the great Bay. The arrival of the blockade-runner suggested another course. She should be permitted to pass through the cordon of investing Japanese vessels. The Russians would not only welcome her entry into the neck-shaped channel, but would actually pilot her through the protecting booms and minefields. Then in the right spot in the funnelled fairway the crew, shipped for the purpose, would scuttle her by explosion. Thus the path of egress of the sorely pressed war fleet within the harbor would be barred, leaving it imprisoned at the mercy of the enfilading siege guns of the next attack by land.

It was a pretty scheme of craft and daring. It was foiled-by a girl.

Of those last hours of the voyage of the Venturer no very clear account is ever obtainable from her navigators. Sometimes they will speak of confused recollections blurred on the retina of memory; but it is not easy to induce them to do this. It was as if all the outside world were dead, so that they moved in the lonely vista of a dream that passed. The hail drove out of the blackness, sloshed over the drenching bridge, penetrated every cranny, stinging with bitter cold. Once in the low

ering gloom of the dawning a gaunt cruiser emerged of a sudden from out the cauldron of the snow fog, the smoke pouring from her brine-encrusted funnels, a stretch of foam streaking the waters in her seething wake. Her megaphone blared menacing inquiry. In obedience to Beatrice's instructions the red port light was unshipped and flashed five timesdot-three dashes-dot; and the warship heaved away, hooting on her syren. "It is the arranged private signal of the Japanese; I learnt it from our prisoners," said the signaller in explanation.

"Are you running this pleasure cruise or is yon girl?" Dummond queried huskily of his companion on the bridge. And Fairton twice reiterated, "The girl."

Gradually, as they crept through the snow smother, the reverberation of distant gunfire resounded nearer. With a blaze of courage in her eyes Beatrice turned to the captain. In a tingle of expectation and hope she pointed to a reach of black water ahead. Over it a battered destroyer danced towards them. A rocket seared the sky. "It's the Russians at last!" she cried, exultingly. "Now they will pilot us

in."

The rocks of the whitened headlands, the farther trench-seamed mountains, broke into the horizon of the sea. The voyage was done.

It is a well-known fact at Lloyd's that one British steamer succeeded in running the blockade into Port Arthur late in the siege.

There were worn men in reeking fortress hospitals who blessed the coming of the Venturer with the merciful medical supplies. There were starving moujik soldiers to whom her advent brought an extra ration of comfort before the next great fight. There was

a Secret Service agent of the Imperial Navy of Japan who reviled old man Lewison in the privacy of his Chefoo office, and spoke cold and brutal words concerning incompetency to perform engagements. And there was a joyful group of underwriters round a flimsy yellow paper in the telegraph-room of the London Royal Exchange who congratulated each other with warmth on the arrival of a heavily insured cargo steamer and subscribed a gratuity for her master. But none of them suspected to whom the credit was rightly due.

Beatrice came into the after cabin and flung back the hooded cape which cloaked her throat and ears. She looked white and spent; there were dark circles under the long-lashed eyes. Fairton rose quickly to greet her. The short days of perilous comradeship were over. It had to be decided what remained.

"The question is what I am going to do now," the girl announced. A hint of appeal mingled with the grave air of innocence on her face.

"Trust yourself to me," said the man who watched her, briefly.

"I've been doing that," she flashed on the impulse.

The Cornhill Magazine.

"From Chefoo to Port Arthur," responded the sailor slowly. "It is not far."

"I'm a pefect disgrace to behold in this frock," said Beatrice, with forlorn irrelevance. "You can't attempt to contradict it," she flushed.

"There is one possible course open to you," began Fairton, ignoring the challenge of the frock.

"Go on!" said the girl as he paused. "It's painfully obvious."

She seated herself on the edge of the saloon table, and dangled a small foot with abandon. "Still, I'll consider it," she offered judicially. Her eyes shone with the wise candor of a child.

"I mentioned my plan to Lewison the night you came on board."

"Every one was making such a hubbub I don't think I can have heard," she murmured in hurried comment.

Wherefore the captain of the Venturer proceeded again to urge his idea to the other person so chiefly concerned. Her verbal consent was muffled by her companion's methods of persuasion. The love color swept enchantingly into her cheeks. And Beatrice became content.

Arthur H. Henderson.

Sainthood is as great a mystery as genius. It is, indeed, moral genius, and only granted to the few; nor is it desirable for the world's morality that this should be otherwise. It is abnormal, irrational, excessive, revolutionary. It is there to set up an ideal, and the average man is there to adapt the ideal to the needs of daily life and so to readjust the balance. More than this, it seems as if saintliness must

"From St. Francis to Dante." By G. G. Coulton. (Nutt. 10s. 6d. net.)

"St. Catherine of Siena and her Times."

generally be produced by its contrary; as if only violent and lawless times have the force to produce such an acute reaction; so that the appearance of saints is, as a rule, the indication of a low current morality. Reflections of this nature are suggested by the two volumes now before us. Mr. Coulton's "From St. Francis to Dante" gives a truthful picture of the ages that engendered a St. Francis and a St. CathBy the author of "Mademoiselle Mori." (Mehuen. 5s. ne t.)

erine-a more enlightening picture than any we have yet read-while in "St. Catherine of Siena and her Times" we get a vivid account of one of the noblest and most human of saints, as well as of the world that surrounded her. Mr. Coulton's book is the more important, because it reveals new truth, by throwing fresh light on old facts, no less than by producing hitherto unknown information. For it is a commentary upon the famous "Autobiography of Brother Salimbene, the Franciscan," from which it gives long extracts, almost chapters; and that valuable work, "the most precious existing authority for the inner life of Catholic folk" at the best period of the Middle Ages, is only "now at last being published in its entirety," under the editorship of Professor HolderEgger, in the Monumenta Germaniae.

An edition was indeed published in 1857 at Parma; but this was printed from an imperfect transcript, mutilated in deference to ecclesiastical susceptibilities. The original MS., after many vicissitudes, had been bought into the Vatican Library in order to render a complete publication impossible; and it was only thrown open to students, with the rest of the Vatican treasures, by the liberality of the late Pope Leo XIII. Even now the complete Salimbene will never be read; for many sheets have been cut out of the MS., and parts of others erased, by certain scandalized readers of long ago.

Mr. Coulton is a far-seeing man and a good writer. What is more remarkable, he contrives to unite a judicial mind with strong convictions, which lend warmth and interest to his style. Salimbene's chronicle, that of a shrewd, humorous, moderate-minded. good, and rather cynical Franciscan, is, naturally, a record of his Order and of the state of the Church; but he affords us many side-lights on the life of people and nobles, and what he tells

us of them is supplemented by St. Catherine's biographer. We are accustomed, most of us, to a William Morris-like picture of the early Middle Ages. "The thirteenth century," says Mr. Coulton, "which from our modern distance seems at first sight to swim in one haze of Fra Angelico blue, shows to the telescope its full share of barren and pestilent marsh." Salimbene wrote of days only thirty and forty years after St. Francis, but the saint's spirit had almost died out among Franciscan Brethren. The degradation of his ideals had begun, as Mr. Coulton points out, even during his lifetime. Brother Elias, his disciple, well known to Salimbene, ossified faith into ritual, and the very austerity of the primal Franciscan standard, too stringent for ordinary people, resulted in a corresponding laxity. Average men returned to their average, and the average of 1260 till 1360, or later, is not pleasant to dwell on. The grossness and uncleanliness were incredible, and the rules laid down for

the friars' manners when at table make us humbly thankful for forks, pocket-handkerchiefs, soap, and other unrealized blessings. More shocking to the moral sense are the rules for their behavior in Church. They talked, they laughed aloud, especially at any blunder in the service; they walked about during mass, gossiping; they slept as a matter of course; and, as can be imagined, the lay congregations were by no means superior to the monastic ones. One day a whole churchful of people rushed away, in the midst of a sermon, to the Cathedral, because they heard that a boypreacher, then in vogue, was at that moment in the pulpit. As for the immorality of the clergy, their simony, their absenteeism, faults so dwelt on at the time of the Reformation, it is dismal to find how they prevailed before 1300. The lash of Dante's tongue

was needed-not by exceptional men, but by the normal monk, priest, or prelate. And St. Catherine of Siena's urgent injunction to her niece, to fly from her confessor the moment her confession was over, is a measure of what had been going on for more than a century before she wrote this. It is a comfort to hear of a few decent and charitable ladies among Salimbene's flock; but he had a poor opinion of women's abilities and deplored their influence. "For woman, whensoever she may," he says, "doth gladly take dominion to herself, as may be seen in Semiramis, who invented the wearing of breeches. . . . Blessed be God who hath brought me to the end of this matter." Yet it was in these days of irreverence and unscrupulous brutality that a robber-nobleman, stained with every crime, or a profligate lordling of Siena, would burst into sudden tears at the sight of Saint Catherine, would kneel down trembling before her, however hard he had sworn to do the contrary, and would obey her like a wolfish kind of lamb; or that Condottieri, like William Flete and Hawkwood, turned hermits and mystics for her sake.

It is a mistake, however, to imagine, as many have done, that the Middle Ages were inwardly uniform in their belief, however uniform their outward observance might be. Salimbene, himself no Puritan, but honest and religious, enlightens us on this point. The widest latitude was allowed for belief as long as outward discipline was not affected. "It was far less dangerous. . . to debate in the schools whether God really existed than to wear publicly and pertinaciously a frock and cowl of any but the orthodox cut." Many men were tortured by religious doubts; others, seeing what the Church was, became indifferent or unbelieving. "For in those days when the Friars Minor and Preachers

begged alms in France in Christ's name, men gnashed with their teeth on them; then, before their very faces, they would call some other poor man and give him money and say, "Take that in Mahomet's name, for he is stronger than Christ.'" Or there were the intellectual Joachites, the followers of the holy mystic Joachim da Fiore, who believed that the Church was not always the same, but must change according to the needs of different ages. As for the various sects among the orthodox, and their wild, often harmful, extravagance, there is no end to them. Lay brothers went about preaching the crudest sensationalism. In 1260, after the great famine, "the Flagellants came through the whole world, and all men . . . noble knights and men of the people, scourged themselves naked in procession through the cities. and restored what they had unlawfully taken away, and they confessed their sins so earnestly that the priests had scarce leisure to eat." Earlier still havoc had been wrought by the Boys' Crusade, a regiment of seven thousand children and youths, who vaguely wandered forth expecting "to cross the sea dry-shod from Genoa to the Holy Land, but, becoming scandalously demoralized, they were dispersed and perished miserably.” Enterprises such as these were probably not unconnected with a charge brought in England against the Friars for "attracting boys by presents of apples and wine." Stranger still was "the Brother of the Horn," who belonged to no religious order, "but lived after his own conscience . . a simple man and unlearned and of holy innocence. . . . He was like another John the Baptist to behold. . . . He had on his head an Armenian cap, his beard was long and black, and he had a little horn of brass. . .

Terribly did

his horn bray at times. His robe was black as sack-cloth of hair," and "thus

clad he went about with his horn, preaching and praising God . . . and a great multitude of children followed him, oft-times with branches of trees and lighted tapers." And equally amazing, though less devout, was Gerardino Segarello of Parma, who conceived the idea of imitating Our Lord's outward actions" and began by putting himself into “a cradle, wrapped in swaddling clothes." Such eccentricities were mainly practised among the people; for as Mr. Coulton tells us, most religious movements proceeded from them. Even the canonization of saints "almost always came from the lower classes," and "Nothing is more false than to suppose that the medieval Church was disciplined like the present Church of Rome." In these circumstances, it is not surprising to find that a certain abbot was canonized "whose claims to sanctity, under investigation, reduced themselves to this --that he had fallen down a well in a state of intoxication and so perished."

It is more edifying to turn to the living protests against such evils, the personalities of the Saints; and of these none is more convincing than that of the Dominican, St. Catherine of Siena. The way in which this new "Life" of her absorbs one, seeming to transmit her force and charm, is the best proof of the author's excellence. It would, indeed, be hard to find an historical biography better done. The writer sets before us a picture, clear, candid, and delicate, of the Saint and of her day; and to pioneer men lucidly through the Siena of the fourteenth century is in itself no mean exploit. To many Catherine Benincasa, the dyer's daughter, born in 1348, is the most attractive Saint in the calendar. She was gay and loving as well as austere; she was pitiless to herself, but reproached herself for demanding too much, spiritually, from others. She was also a visionary with

It

common sense, a rare combination. was characteristic of her that when at eight years old she ran away one afternoon to be a hermit she took some bread and a jug of water with her, lest the angels should forget to bring her food, and at nightfall she ran home again for fear of making her parents anxious. Perhaps it was her shrewd insight which gave her so much influence over the young patrician "sparks" of her city, one of whom, Stefano Maconi, became her secretary and remained her devotee-this and her deep human sympathy, which helped to reconcile city with city and family with family. There was one famous occasion when she undertook to make up the fierce feud long existing between the Maconi on one side and the Tolomei and Rinaldini on the other. The three families were to come and conclude a peace in the Church of San Cristoforo. The Maconi were there, but not the others. Catherine knelt at the altar praying for their arrival, till, drawn by her prayers and against their will, they came. But when they saw her on her knees, rapt in her devotions, her cause was won and the terrible quarrel at an end. Her hold could never have been so strong had she not suffered herself. There were few spiritual torments she did not know, for doubt, despair, awful imaginings attacked her at intervals all her life, and more especially in the early years of her vocation. Yet when all is said, her power remains a mystery. She must have been what is called "electric," possessed of an abnormal vitality-of that strength which enabled her to nurse the plague-stricken city and even to cure her colleague. Raimondo. When he fell at her feet, a victim of the pest, she held his head between her hands and put him into a deep sleep which lasted twenty-four hours and left him whole. A stateswoman she never was, because, as her