"I'm going to keep Light'us some time, an' I'm prattising going up and down steps."

"I see. That's a good idea. Let's see you go up them now. I know you can come down quick enough."

And Robin fitted his crutch and took a preliminary scuff along the level, and went up the steps like a bird.

"Bravo, Cock Robin!" clapped Mr. Polketty. "You'll do, old man. Here's a medal for you," and gave him a penny and told him to go and spend it while he had a talk with his father.

That talk left old Rob more despondent than ever. He had had to ask Mr. Polketty to give him extra time on a bill that was due, and Mr. Polketty had done so on his signing a document which put Durtons in possession of the business if he failed to pay in due course. It gave him another month, but he had very little hope of paying it even then, save and scrimp as he might, and he had cut rations down to bare living point for a long time past. And then he and Robin would have to walk out paupers-to the workhouse, or the Harbor, or wherever a final resting-place might offer.

That dismal month added many years to his age, and as it drew to an end his spirits sank till they could get no lower without oozing out into his boots. What would become of them he could not tell and dared not think. Sixty-five years and seven, and a suit of clothes each, and a small crutch! A slim outfit for the grim battle of life!

The thought of it curdled poor old Rob's feelings till he groaned aloud of a night and woke Cock Robin from his sleep, and to quiet him he had to tell the boy that the rheumatics had gripped him again, and poor little Cock Robin rubbed the aching place, as he supposed, till he fell asleep again. What a mighty relief it would have been if it had only been rheumatics! He had thought rheumatics bad enough

at the time, but they were nothing to this. He knew not where to turn or what to do. The thought of the work. house overlaid him like a nightmare. The Harbor drew him even more strongly. It was only the thought of Robin kept him back. If only he were alone how very little would it trouble him. As with his wife, he had come to the point of longing only to lie down and rest, and let the storms sweep by overhead as they chose.

But Robin! Poor little Cock Robin! How could he fight along alone? And the thought of him in the workhouse was too terrible. Better, infinitely better, to think of him quietly underground.

In his agony or fear for the lad, his heart cried poignantly to the Power which the life of the seas had dimly taught him to recognize, just as he had more than once cried out for help in times of peril-sweet juice of bitterness squeezed out by sheer weight of woe

"God, take him sooner than have him suffer! Take him! Take him!"

And that seemed to him so much the better thing for the boy that the agonized cry became a continual prayer, though it never passed his lips in words. And sometimes, when he looked into Robin's gleaming face with that cry in his heart, he groaned dolorously in the spirit and felt like a murderer.

And yet! And yet! He felt hopeless and broken, and the thought of the crippled lad in the workhouse was too much for him.

He dragged through the dark days somehow, with all his little world crumbling into ruins about him. And no darker state seemed possible to him.

Then one night Robin came in less blithely than usual, and it seemed to his father that the little white face looked peaked and pinched as he had never known it before.

"Robin, ahoy! Where from, boy?" asked the old man, essaying a spurt

into cheerfulness which was very far from him.

"Watching Light'us light up," said Robin, "an' it were co-o-old," and the little teeth chattered and the little lips looked blue, and a hoarse cough broke from them which startled his father.

He hurried the boy to bed and piled blankets on him, and gave him a hot posset of bread and milk and rum such as he remembered his own mother giving him when he was a boy.

Robin fell into an uneasy sleep, and his father sat by the bedside watching him with gloomy apprehension. It dawned slowly on his tired soul that the answer to his broken calling was coming and that the lad was going.

Robin started up suddenly with a croak like the bark of a tortured dog, and sat choking convulsively, grasping for breath with his very hands, almost black in the face. His father sprang up in terror, and held him in his arms and patted him on the back, almost beside himself. But the boy fought through it and lay back, spent and gasping, and the old man sat down Again, shaking all over, and waited earfully for the next spasm. It did not seem possible for the frail little body to stand much of that kind of work.

He had asked to have the boy taken, yet now when he seemed like going, the old man's heart was torn with a sense of loss and utter desolation.

To have no Cock Robin to chirp and gleam at him, to nestle warmly in his rough old arms in bed, to sit on his knee at night, to feel and handle and love! Why, what had he been thinking of? The one only thing he had left in all the world that was his very own, and that could and did love him' in return. Part with Cock Robin? Down he fell on his knees by the bedside and prayed hard for a reversal of his former prayer.

"God, I'm an old fool and don't know rightly what I want. But don't take the boy! He's all I've got. Take everything else but leave me him! Leave me him! Leave me him!" and he went on murmuring the last words with his head in his hands and his thoughts running free.

"And yet I dun know . . . if it's to bring him sorrow maybe he's better away. I dun know what's best

...

A long pause, and then, at last -crude and rough, but pure gold hot from the fire-the prayer of prayers that all must come to sooner or later: "Do what Thee sees best Thysen, Lord, for I dunnot know."

He heard the lusty crying of a child through the wall of the next house. Robin on the bed jerked his head back again with that terrible bark which sounded like death. Rob sprang to him again and gave him the comfort of his arms, and heartened him with hopeful words, and feared each moment to see the little limbs straighten out into unnatural quiet. But they came through that bout too, and as soon as the boy lay still the old man hammered on the wall as if he would beat a passage through with his fists. Presently he heard a knocking on the shop door downstairs, and he ran down and opened it and found his neighbor there. "Why, what's up, Mr. Nutgal?" he asked.

"T" boy's dying, I'm afeard. Will you wait wi' him till I git doctor?"

"I'll send t' wife. She knows all about kids," and in two minutes the wife came hurrying up the stairs. "Croup!" she said, as soon as she heard Rob's tale. "I lost one wi' it just about his size. You run for doctor. I'll wait wi' him. He'll maybe be quiet now till yo' git back. Go quick!"

No need to tell old Rob to go quick. He went for Robin's life, and he hauled the old doctor back by one arni. crab-fashion, like a side-hitched tug

bringing in a light ship against a cross gale.

The wife from next door had already lighted a fire in the room and put on the big kettle, and the Doctor nodded when he saw it.

"You've been here before?" he said. "Ay!" said the woman. "But he went all the same," and she went back to her own youngsters, and the other two set to work to wrestle for the life of little Cock Robin.

When they had eased the constricted throat by means of hot water applications, and had the kettle steaming merrily into the room through a brown paper funnel which Rob deftly constructed, the Doctor sat down before the fire and drew the old man out. He was a student of more than medicine and would sooner read a man than any book that ever was written. And Rob, unstrung by his fears for Robin, told the genial old fellow all that was in him, and found relief in the telling. And the Doctor took it all in and mused upon it, and his musing bore fruit, as it had a way of doing.

"And what are you thinking of doing?" he asked.

"God knows! I dunnot," said Rob gloomily. "Work'us, I s'pose."

"There ought to be some better way than that. We must look round," said the Doctor thoughtfully. And Rob felt suddenly as if the dark clouds that enveloped him had opened and let through a ray of light.

Cock Robin had a pretty bad time of it. He had sat so long watching the Lighthouse light up that night that it came near to putting his own light out. However, with the help of his father and the Doctor, he came through it all, Longman's Magazine.

croup and chills and fever. And it was a Cock Robin that looked as if it had gone through an unusually hard winter that sat up in bed at last and did justice to the good things the Doctor brought him with his own hands.

"Why, Cock Robin," said the cheery old gentleman one day, "you'll be hopping about as lively as ever in no time. What are you going to make of yourself when you grow big?"

"Keep Light'us," said Robin, with sparkling eyes.

"Ay?" said the Doctor, taking a pinch of snuff and regarding him thoughtfully. "But you couldn't get up and down the stairs."

"Cou'n't I? You wait till you see. I bin practising."

"It's wonderful how he do go up and down 'em," said Rob, who had come up with the Doctor, leaving the shop to take care of itself. "He can beat me at it by a long chalk."

"Ay, ay! Well now, it's odd that idea should be in him, very odd. I'm on the Harbor Trust, you know, and old Rattray, out there on the Light, is getting pretty well on. He can take his pension any time. I was thinking of asking you if you'd care for the post, Mr. Nutgal, but I was afraid the boy's lameness would stand in your way. It's eighteen shillings a week and food and lodging found. What do you say?"

"I say Yes!" said Cock Robin with a shout. "I'd sooner keep a Light'us than be anything-'cept maybe it was a doctor."

Old Rob did not speak, but the hairy brown hand he shoved out to the Doctor shook with the things he left unsaid.

John Oxenham.

is the work of Palladio, and was begun in 1565. It is not long since Roman remains were discovered on the island, that was in old days called Isola dei Cipressi-the island of the cypresses. It would seem that there was a Benedictine monastery here so long ago as 985. The Doge Domenico Michele is buried within the Church of Palladio. It was he who brought the two granite columns from Syria, that are now, and have been since 1180, the chiefest ornament of the Piazzeta exquisitely visible from S. Giorgio: with these he also brought the body of S. Isodoro, a not less precious gift. Over his tomb are carved the words, "Terror Graecorum hic jacet." The monastery, together with how many others in Italy, has been secularized, and is now used as an artillery barracks.

It is perhaps from this island that one has the finest view of the Doge's palace, a dream of splendor in the distance. And one cannot help asking oneself as one gazes on so much beauty, How long will it remain with us to rejoice us of the modern world?

For in spite of the fact that the fall of S. Mark's Tower came as a surprise, at least to the outer world, though it would appear those responsible for the buildings of Venice had frequently been warned by their own architect of its inevitable fall unless various repairs were undertaken, it is not so long since we were told that that side of the ducal palace from which springs the Bridge of Sighs was gradually sinking into the mud, whither, in how short a time, all Venice must surely follow!

The inevitable decay of the piles of white poplar wood driven into the mud, the dredging of the lagoon and the tide-way for the huge modern ships, the wash and swirl and hurry of the penny steamboats up and down the Grand Canal that was surely

never meant for them-all have contributed towards the downfall of that majestic and lovely tower whose loss we have as yet hardly realized, whose fall has left our world by how great a thought less lovely than of old.

"The bells of San Marco," says d'Annunzio in his latest book, "gave the signal for the Angelus, and their ponderous roll dilated in long waves along the mirror of the harbor, vibrated through the masts of the ships, spread afar towards the infinite lagoon. From San Giorgio Maggiore, from San Giorgio dei Greci, from San Giorgio Degli Schiavoni, from San Giovanni in Bragora, from San Moise, from the churches of the Salute and the Rendatore and beyond, over the whole domain of the Evangelist, from the far towers of the Madonna dell' Orto, of San Giobbe, of Sant' Andrea, bronze voices answered mingling in one great chorus, spreading over the silent company of stones and water one great dome of invisible metal, the vibrations of which seemed to reach the twinkling of the earliest stars. In the purity of evening the sacred voices gave the City of Silence a sort of immensity of grandeur. From the summit of their temples they brought anxious mankind the message sent by the immortal multitudes hidden in the darkness of deep aisles, or mysteriously troubled by the light of votive lamps; they brought to spirits worn out by the day the message of the superhuman creatures figured on the walls of secluded chapels and in the niches of inner altars, who had announced miracles and promised worlds, and all the apparitions of the consoling Beauty invoked by unassuming Prayer rose on that storm of sound, spoke in that aerial chorus, irradiated the face of the marvellous night."

That chorus has gone for ever, having lost its chiefest voice. How long will its broken song, gradually diminishing, proclaim the birth of the Son of God to this out-moded world of sea distances and lapsing tides? Glorified by her smouldering sunsets, Venice is even now a city of profound