ascended the steps. The heavy blade descended, the hard steel tore sharply through the white soft neck— and the wife had her wish, and had rejoined her husband. The Revolution, as Vergniaud said, Saturnlike, devoured its own children. The Montagnard denouncer went the common way. His fate had one feature of peculiar bitterness. He was executed on the ninth Thermidor, when Robespierre had fallen from power, and when, in consequence, the "Terror" was at an end. As the tumbrils which contained its last Fournées rolled onwards to the Barrière du Trone, the people in the streets of Saint Antoine shouted to the condemned that Robespierre had fallen, and tried to save the last victims of his reign. The Montagnard made frantic efforts; he appealed passionately to the people for help, for life; he recited his services and his sufferings for the Revolution. It seemed for one moment—a moment of unspeakable anxiety to the Montagnard-that the mob would save the last deathbatch of the "Terror." His maddened shrieks for life died away, stifled in the hoarseness of despair, as black Henriot, waving his sabre, and calling on the mounted escort, charged, and drove back the surging mob. Henriot succeeded in delivering to Sanson the tale of seventy heads, but the wretched Montagnard seemed more dead than alive as he was hurried up the steps of the guillotine. In that terrible instant, in which a gleam of hope for his life shone vainly upon the Montagnard, Lucile and Victor were perhaps avenged. Jacques August-Tenth and his tricoteuse wife perished on Vendémiaire 13th, when Citizen Buonaparte, with a whiff of grapeshot, blew the life out of the sansculottism of the Revolution, as it stood at bay in its lást effort against the counter-revolution, under Lepelletier, in the Church of St Roch.

After Vendémiaire came a time in which the "Terror" was execrated and its many victims mourned. At the Bals à Victime crape on the left arm was worn by many in sorrowing sympathy for the fate of Lucile and of Victor; and, reader, we too may mourn them still. They were the lesser natures for whom, even when most innocent, it is ever dangerous to come between the fell pass and incensed points of mighty opposites. They stood, in their helpless innocence, between the opponents in the terrible struggle that ensued when the long misrule of effete authority was supplanted by sanguinary French anarchy. They, with so many others, were victims of that great conflict; but the pathos of their fate is not on that account the less. They were caught up, and whirled round to death, in the maelstrom of the Revolution. Lucile was a rare and ideal woman ; a woman with the balanced beauty of the equal soul and frame. How fair, how tender, and how good she was! Like Posthumous, her young husband seems to us ennobled by the high love of such a wife. She makes him beautiful, as the moon hallows the earth. Beauty and courage, united by such tender love, pass, in the prime and glory of their radiant youth, to death, through the red frame of the hideous guillotine. Sorrow and suffering end there. Born in another, and a happier time, we had, perhaps, met them, joyous and joy-giving, as types of happiness and of charm; but chancing to be placed in the mad fever-time of the Revolution, we see them in the stony grey of dungeons, and we part with them when Fate has led them to her fatal scaffold. And shall not we too, O reader, mourn, if it be but for a moment, in these far-removed times, the sad and early deaths of these victims of the "Terror" ?

HARRY ORMOND'S CHRISTMAS

DINNER.

TELL ELL you how we passed the first Christmas Day after we were married? Well, I don't mind telling you about it. As I look back, my memory of the day is full of tenderness checkered with merriment; it was a day of mirth and happiness, dashed with just a little pain. You see, we married very young and rather imprudently. I was poor at that time. Polly's friends objected wholly to the match; and, moreover, they persecuted her to marry another man. At this distance of time I can afford to forgive, and therefore I will merely record my conviction that that man was a beast. Pauline's family were not worthy of her; she well knows that it is so, though she cannot be brought to admit the fact. The views of the family differed totally from the views that Polly and myself entertained, and as she was very wretched, and was even becoming ill, we resolved upon a rash but decisive step. Why did we marry in November, at such a dismal time of the year? Why, because, I suppose, we loved each other so much that we did not care to wait for fine weather. I have no sympathy with pride of family; but still it would be wrong to conceal the fact that Polly was connected. with the Fitz-Bakers of Harley Street-a fact which will of itself lead the intelligent reader to infer that

she had been brought up in great gentility, and had been surrounded by comfort and even luxury.

It

The marriage was a quiet-a very quiet one. was strictly private. Some persons called it a stolen. marriage, but we did not mind them. We were married, by private arrangement, at St Botolph-cumAlphage, at eight o'clock, on a misty, damp, chilly winter morning. The hour was chosen partly in order to enable my friend George Lawler, who was to give away Polly, to be in court at ten. The other friend present was my cousin Frank (of H.M. gunboat Bowzer), and we were all to breakfast together, after the wedding, before Polly and I started on our wedding tour. We looked, when we met outside the church,. rather like a party of cold, sheepish criminals; but Frank soon put some life and warmth into his fellowconspirators.

When I said that only two friends were present, I forgot Hector. Hector was (and is, for that matter) a black-and-tan colley-dog. He is of an affectionate and playful disposition, and is extravagantly fond of his little mistress; though it is not for me to blame him for that, seeing that I am just as bad. He is an irrepressible animal. When Polly left home he escaped with her. To do him justice, Hector had never liked the other man, but had always been friendly with me, even before he could have known that we should eventually become connected by marriage. He invited himself to assist at our wedding, and was the first to enter the church, with a view probably of ascertaining, from personal inspection, that all preparations were made. I was greatly disturbed in mind as to his possible conduct during the sacred rite; but I did him a great injustice. He was so unobtrusive that I quite

lost sight of him, and having other things to think of, I soon forgot his presence.

This pleasing reticence on Hector's part was subsequently accounted for by a discovery (made by the pew-opener) that he had been all the time engaged in worrying a hassock in a private pew. I well remember how cold and empty the church seemed, and how the clergyman's voice echoed through the chill void. The mural tablets and monuments looked at us depressingly, and I had, for one moment, a terrible thrill of anxiety as I thought how my darling was giving up friends, and sacrificing perhaps better fortunes, in order to link her future life with mine. She was all smiles, and tears, and blushes. I remember how her little hand trembled on my arm, and how cold it was as I clasped it in mine; and yet she looked so pretty, and was-oh! so very, very dear to me.

We all breakfasted together, and then Polly and I drove to the railway station. I had scraped together enough money for a honeymoon trip of a fortnight. Polly had written home a letter, which was to be posted en route, and she was terribly anxious about the result.

We started. Hector, by order of a hard-hearted station-master, had been immured in a dog-hutch in the van; but as the train sped on his faithful howlings were so distracting, and so afflicting to his tenderhearted little mistress, that when we stopped at the first station I had to bribe a porter to let Hector join us. In his barkings and gambols of ecstasy he frightened an elderly maiden lady in the carriage, and then Polly had to take him up on her seat, where he remained quiet for the rest of the journey.

We rested that night by the shore, with ocean sounding, with star and system rolling past; and