difficulty in realizing that he was himself intimately connected with it; somehow he felt something of the aloofness of a mere spectator, unthrilled by excitement, though all the while he was conscious of the fact that he was in the grip of a mortal fear. His perceptions were sharpened wonderfully. Every object within view was seen with a distinctness of detail which was abnormal, and each one of them seemed to possess a peculiar and insistent interest for him. He noted every stain on the canvas fatigue-kit of his enemy, and caught himself wondering how and by what each one of them had been caused; he spied a mole with coarse hairs sprouting from it on the man's left cheek, and marvelled that the man did not pluck them out instead of leaving such unsightly things to offend the eye; and then he noticed, this time with a shock of astonishment, that the fellow's hands were shaking. Till then Stevenson, inconsequently enough, had felt convinced that he alone was afraid: now it occurred to him suddenly that the German was in no better case. The discovery elated him in an extraordinary fashion. At once he cocked his head, threw back his shoulders, and tried to smile. Regarded as a smile it was a deplorable failure, for the muscles of his face were very stiff in the sockets, but in the circumstances it was not discreditable, and it obviously discomposed the German.

"Etes-vous prêts ?" rasped out the voice of the non-commissioned officer. Stevenson, made aware suddenly of the intense preoccupation in which he had been sunk, started violently, nearly dropping his rifle, as he mumbled an unintelligible assent. The German jerked a sound out of himself, half pant, half grunt.

"Un!" cried the voice again. The men raised their rifles to their shoulders, and Stevenson found himself in

stinctively cuddling his chin into the stock in search of an easy position.

"Deux!" He glanced along the dully glinting barrel, and saw at an enormous distance, so it seemed, a shining silver ring suspended in mid-air, encircling a spot of inky blackness. The ring danced this way and that, up and down and from side to side, in a manner which made Stevenson dizzy to watch. The big bruised face of the German, contorted by spasms, leered above it with wide open jaw, as though he were trying to catch that circle of metal in his teeth.

"Trois!" What immense pauses occurred between each word! The ring was revolving madly now, whirling round and round and shooting forth long rays of light of all the colors of the prism, and in that whirling aureola the face of the German was seen monstrous and grimacing, and suddenly grey beneath the purple patches of bruise. Stevenson, in a condition bordering on a hypnotic trance, kept his eyes fixed upon that wheel of blazing flames, the core of which was the tiny silver circle, and almost lost the sense of his own identity. He seemed to be floating in space, drawn irresistibly towards that point of dazzling light, while something throbbed and pulsed, like the engine of a motor-car, filling the world with a great din. It was the sound of his own heart-beats that deafened him.

"Feu!"

At last the long torture was ended, the supreme moment had come. Yet for an instant nothing happened. Then the heavens rocked to the roar of a mighty detonation. Stevenson heard something scream in his ear, and felt a cold breath upon his cheek. He had shut his eyes, and dropped his finger from the trigger. Now he opened them, and dropped his rifle to the ready. He looked for the German, and for a minute failed to find him. The

silver ring with its circle of gyrating flames had vanished. A fat ungainly figure was kneeling on the ground shouting for mercy, its useless rifle thrown aside.

Then at last Stevenson arrived at an understanding of what had happened. The German had fired and had missed his aim. He was now completely at the mercy of the Englishman. For the life of him Stevenson, his calm and his self-confidence miraculously restored, could not forbear to raise his rifle, and take deliberate aim at the squirming wretch before him. But the agony which he caused made him convict himself of brutality, and he presently dropped his rifle to the carry,

Temple Bar.

opened the breech and jerked the loaded cartridge on to the grass at his feet. "And that was the end of my duel with the German in the Legion of Strangers, sir," he said to me. "And though we were neither of us hurt, I had had more than I wanted. I deserted soon after, and gave myself up to my old Battery, and my major treated me real well, so I'm like to get my stripes before long. You take it from me, sir, there are worse places than a barrack-room of the British Army. I don't hold with having too much truck with foreigners, a man don't know where to have 'em, not after what I have gone through in "The Legion of Strangers'!"

Hugh Clifford, C.M.G.

The other day, while glancing down the columns of "Answers to Correspondents" in a journal of repute, we came across one to this effect:"Regina (Malvern).-Has your fiancé read Lecky's 'Map of Life'? It is not at all difficult to read, and seems just what he wants. With regard to philosophy and logic, there are several excellent elementary works published dealing with these subjects, notably Jevons's little book on logic, which has not yet been superseded by more pretentious works." Now here we evidently have a young lady desirous of educating her fiancé up to her own standard, and calling in aid from outside to her assistance. Is not this a significant change indeed from the oldfashioned days when the hero of a book had the heroine intellectually under his thumb, so to speak, for the whole three volumes? We all know the delightful way in which our fa

vorite works of fiction used to undulate along. The hero makes the acquaintance of a beautiful, blushing girl, whose simple white robes are as innocent and sweet as her maiden fancies. How happy a destiny, he thinks (in chap. 2), to be entrusted with the care and guardianship of this delicate flower! He then proceeds to the wooing, and after sufficient incident to justify the three volumes, the heroine disappears from our delighted gaze on the stalwart arm of her gallant husband.

Or perhaps there was another variety of entertainment offered to the public. The heroine is a self-willed, impulsive, yet withal radiant personality, who is determined to dislike the hero, while he on his part is determined to overcome that aversion and turn it into a "warm regard." (How the familiar words come back to one!) For our own part, this second motif was

by far the favorite. We all know the methods employed by the stern, selfcontained, unbending hero to subdue his chosen lady,-the request that she will not ride the black horse, "Tippoo," without his consent, and the catastrophe that follows when Lady Disdain mounts "Tippoo," and is thrown on a desolate moor,-desolate for all she knows, that is, for the hero, superbly mounted on an equally ferocious steed "Surajah Dowlah," appears on the scene at once, and supports his self-willed lady-love to one of those convenient little cottages of fiction that are occupied by obliging old women who provide a spotless parlor and an easy chair for the heroine to listen to her lecture in. After a delightful little meal, in which wild strawberries and bowls of milk play an important part, the heroine is taken home riding meekly by the side of her cavalier, whose presence has a magical effect upon Master "Tippoo." But the book is not all taken up with pleasure excursions by any means. Far from it. The hero devotes most of his time to training the mind of his lady-love, who is gently led on from point to point till he can congratulate himself on having taken her through a modified College course.

There must be some who remember the methods employed by John in "The Wide, Wide World" to fit Ellen to be his consort, the pages of history which she had to peruse, the French moral anecdotes that he told in society with a keen eye for signs of intelligent participation on Ellen's speaking countenance, and the astronomical studies which she had to say she liked. In another book by the same gifted authoress we are told, speaking of the heroine, that the hero "took her hands from pots and pans and put into them philosophies"; while in another charming work the honeymoon

was devoted to the study of Hebrew. But those days, it would seem, are past. The present-day heroine has changed all that. It is her turn now to teach French, and she begins with an easy little phrase that any man can master in a few seconds,-Place aux dames. Nor is she behindhand in the teaching of philosophy. Modern heroes have to learn a good deal of it. Can we imagine the heroine of the present day submitting to dictation in the way that was the joy of her predecessors? If the modern hero were to presume to offer advice, he would find himself in a book within a month as an interesting psychological study. Or could we imagine, say, Miss Fowler's heroines sitting meekly with their needlework, picking up such crumbs of wit and wisdom as their fiancés might let fall within their reach? No, indeed, the heroine of the twentieth century will not submit to be bored by any one, least of all by her reigning fiancé. And here we touch upon the chief difference between the old and the new style. The old-fashioned works of fiction to which we have alluded were planned on a simple method that left nothing to be desired. Every Ellen had her John, so to speak, and there was the whole plot at a glance. But the modern heroine knows better than that. It is almost necessary to keep a slip of paper in one's book to help one to remember which is the present fiancé, so that there may be no needless confusion of thought and the reader's mind left free to grapple with the mental crises and problems of the heroine. Modern novel-readers will sympathize with the little girl who, on reading Mignet's "French Revolution" for the first time, asked wearily, "Hadn't I better put an asterisk against the names of those who weren't guillotined?" Some of us find it very difficult to remember who were

Again, we have inentioned the problems and mental crises of the modern heroine. In present-day fiction the heroine calculates to a nicety the feelings with which she regards the hero. "To love, or not to love? that is the question," she muses, as in the seclusion of her apartment she reviews the situation. Tom is a dear boy, there is no doubt about it; he rides well, talks sense, and has the very nicest motorcar she knows, but he did not seem very intelligent about Ibsen, and could she look forward to spending her life with a man who only knows Maeterlinck by name, and who has no interest in Buddhism? Or suppose there has been a disagreement, and two seemingly devoted lovers (who have even taken us in) are separated, what happens? The heroine retires from observation for half an hour (she is not to be interrupted for that space of time unless the proofs come from the printer's or the photographer's) and takes stock of the damage done The Spectator.

titled "Passions and Problems," or some such title, the heart will prove to have been decidedly cracked but, as with old china, that only makes it more valuable. She adds one more experience to her rosary and travels on like a giant refreshed.

Now could any one imagine the oldfashioned heroine behaving in this way? Could one picture Ellen trifling with John's affection? Sooner could we imagine the daisies refusing to lift their little heads to the sun! Rather was the engagement a time of probation, which if satisfactorily passed through by the heroine led to the higher school of marriage, when the visiting teacher was transformed into the resident tutor. The times have indeed changed since those days. The scales are held more evenly now. Gentle Ellen Montgomery, doubtless resting humbly at John's feet in CarraCarra churchyard, you are avenged! The whirligig of time has brought in his revenges.

"The splendid imposture of Judicial Astrology"-to use Scott's phraseseems to be again rearing its head, and another magazine devoted to it has just been added to those already published in London. No doubt its readers will be drawn exclusively from the large class of persons who, either from superstition and ignorance on the one hand, or from mysticism on the other, habitually give their belief without waiting for their reason to be convinced. Yet there is not at first sight any inherent absurdity in the

theory that lies at the base of all astrological doctrine. If we assumeand the facts are so far entirely in favor of the assumption-that the constitutions and temperaments of individuals differ from one another in particulars for which heredity is an insufficient explanation, it is consistent with all that we know of the universe that these variations occur in some regular and predetermined order. That this order can have anything to do with the stars may, indeed, appear a fantastic imagining; but when we

consider that the movements of the heavenly bodies have always formed and probably will always form man's chief measure of time, a connection is seen that was not at first apparent. If we look upon the stars as the hands of a gigantic clock, and the different varieties of individual constitution as assigned to different moments of cosmical time, we have a perfectly consistent theory of the action of the stars upon the individual. All that would then remain to establish the theory on a scientific basis, would be to note the variations of constitution that correspond to different moments of cosmical time, and to deduce from them the order in which they occur and recur. As we shall presently see, this is a process that has never been followed by any devotee of the so-called science of astrology.

The means adopted by astrologers for ascertaining the relative positions of the heavenly bodies at the birth of the individual-which in their jargon is called casting a horoscope-are extremely simple. The Zodiac or apparent path traced by the sun in his yearly course through certain constellations is its basis, and their first care is to note the particular part of the Zodiac which appears on the horizon at the moment of birth. The Zodiac is then divided into twelve parts called "houses," and the places of the "planets," including in this phrase the sun and moon, with reference to the Zodiac are next ascertained and inserted in their respective houses. When this is complete, the astrologer has a tolerably correct diagram of the heavens as they would appear at the birth to a person standing upon the earth at the particular spot where the birth takes place. This geocentric way of looking at things is to be accounted for by the fact that when men first began to cast horoscopes, they imagined the earth to be the centre of the universe, but

viewing the whole process as a means of fixing a given moment of cosmical time, it is at least as good as any other. The places of the stars and planets were before the rise of Greek astronomy ascertained by actual inspection of the sky, but can now be determined to the fraction of a second by spherical trigonometry. But there is no occasion for the astrologer to be even acquainted with this. Thanks to the ephemerides, or almanacks giving the daily place of the heavenly bodies, issued for the use of navigators, and to the invention of logarithms, all the data required for casting a horoscope can be acquired by anyone acquainted with the elementary rules of arithmetic. It would, therefore, cost nothing but a little patience for anyone to form a corpus or collection of horoscopes of individuals the time of whose birth can be accurately ascertained, and from them to deduce the canon of any correspondence that might appear between the configuration of the heavenly bodies and the accidents of their lives.

It is not, however, in this way that the pretended science of astrology is constituted. When the horoscope is cast, it has to be judged or interpreted -or in other words, the bodily form, mental peculiarities, and the leading events likely to happen to the "native" or person for whom it is cast have to be predicted from its appearance. But the rules by which this prediction is made are derived not from any systematic collection and observation of facts, but from tradition, and this tradition can be traced in essential points to one source. With the single exception of predictions arising out of the movements of the planets Uranus and Neptune, which were undiscovered three centuries ago, this one source is the Tetrabiblos of Ptolemy, a work which cannot, on any hypothesis, be assigned to an earlier date than 140