He surveyed his visitor calmly. It was the survey of one who is accustomed to judging and appraising his fellow-men, and one who leaves no possible motive unprobed in his search for cause and reason. Mr. Barrows thought of another point, which he had passed too lightly.

"As for His Majesty," he said, "I have hopes that my action will serve to heal an old wound."

The Chancellor asked another question.

"And what if you cannot have this interview?"

"That," was the reply, "is in your Excellency's hands."

Perhaps the statesman liked the answer. Apparently he had no more questions to ask, for he stood silent, his hands at his back, his eyes turned towards the table littered with writing, his face in shadow, but with the soft glow of a shaded lamp falling around it from behind. For Mr. Barrows it was a long and anxious pause.

It was broken suddenly. "To-morrow," said the Chancellor thoughtfully, "you will have your answer. You may come here by eleven o'clock."

"I thank your Excellency," said Mr. Barrows.

The interview was over. Instead of calling a servant, the Baron, without a word, conducted his visitor from the room, and then led the way from the main corridor into a smaller one. This brought them to a side-door facing a deserted street.

"This is a better way," said the

Chancellor. "To this door you will come to-morrow."

That was all. Mr. Barrows passed out, and the door closed silently behind him. Making his way back through the quieter streets of the city, he returned to his hotel, and passed the remainder of the evening in his

room.

He spent a night of restlessness and anxiety. One part of his trial had now passed, and it had passed in a better manner than he had dared to hope; but he saw that the way was not yet clear. In dealing with statesmen nothing must be taken for granted, and nothing regarded as certain until it had been accomplished. Yet he knew the reputation of the Chancellor, and, indeed, knew a great deal more; and all that he knew, as well as the incidents of the interview, gave him a certain confidence. That keen and able brain would weigh this matter in its every aspect, and would sift it thoroughly. It would number the points as they rose, good and evil; and exactly as the numbers stood at last, so would his action be. Mr. Barrows thought he had put his case in such a way that it was a strong case; but he tormented himself all night with the thought that it might have been stronger. For instance, might he not have used a name instead of the phrase a "powerful and unscrupulous enemy," knowing, as he knew, that the Chancellor and Count Brode had no sympathy with each other? Yet on full consideration he felt that he had done wisely not to use

a name.

As it was, his impression of the Chancellor as one statesman stood in opposition to his knowledge of diplomatists as a body, and this gave him a very troublous time before morning came. When he went to keep his appointment it was with a doubtful heart and a hesitating step.

On reaching the house, however, he

found that he was looked for. The door opened as he reached it, and a mute servant ushered him into the cabinet. There he found the Chancellor waiting.

His greeting was answered briefly. Then came the other answer.

"I have seen His Majesty, Mr. Barrows. He has consented to grant you an interview this morning."

Watching the effect of this abrupt announcement, the Chancellor saw relief and some other emotion-could it be gratitude?-appear in his visitor's face. "Come," he said an instant later, "we will go at once."

He led the way, and Barrows accompanied him in silence. They passed into the gardens of the Chancellor's house, which were very extensive; for this quarter of the great city was entirely devoted to official purposes, containing not only the Government residences, but also the Congress buildings and the Imperial Palace. Mr. Barrows knew that the Chancellor's house was that which stood nearest to the palace, and saw that his ordeal was close at hand.

Presently they reached, at the end of the garden, a door, which the Chancellor opened with a private key. A short covered way brought them to another door, where an armed sentry stood on guard. He saluted the Chancellor, who opened this door in the same way. Mr. Barrows followed, and found himself standing in the imperial gardens.

They lay utterly deserted in the morning sunshine, silent save for the murmur of fountains and the cooing of numberless doves. As the two entered Mr. Barrows had a glimpse of the palace in the distance, rising whitefronted upon a series of terraces, brilliant with flowers and gleaming with statuary. It was only a glimpse, however, for his guide turned into a walk which led them away from the palace

at right angles, and which was sheltered by tall shrubs. In a few minutes they reached a small summer-house, standing where several paths converged.

"His Majesty," said the Chancellor, "will see you here. If you please, you will wait until he comes."

He led the way into the building, which was simply furnished. They looked round in silence. Then the Baron faced his visitor.

"Bearing in mind the pain of associations-remembering what His Majesty has suffered, and his advanced age you will be discreet?"

Mr. Barrows breathed deep. "I will be discreet," he answered quietly.

That was the last word. The Chancellor walked away, taking a path towards the palace.

If Mr. Barrows had found the night of uncertainty trying, this period of waiting in the midst of silent sunshine was much more so. One difficulty had vanished, only to give greater prominence to the next; and he was face to face, sooner than he had expected, with that which was the most difficult part of his adventure. He had time to realize this while he waited; and the realization threw him into a state of agitation which boded ill for the fulfilment of his pledge to be discreet. He paced the chamber unevenly, now pausing to move a chair, now bending over the table to examine with unobservant eyes the books scattered upon it. All the while he strained his ears to listen, and turned again and again to glance at the turn of the path which the Chancellor had taken.

The moments passed slowly-all the more slowly, it seemed, because of the stillness; and they were moments during which he lived intensely; but at length his straining ear caught the sound of footsteps. As soon as he heard them they seemed to strike loud

upon the stillness. Breathlessly he watched the turn in the path. Then an old gentleman in gray, tall and military in figure, but with the unChambers's Journal.

mistakable stoop of age, came round the corner and approached the summer-house.

W. E. Cule.

Lockhart remarks in the "Life of Scott" that the germs of the Waverley Novels are to be found in "The Border Minstrelsy" and the notes to the Ballads. Naturally the remark applies even more to the poems that came fresh from the mint of the youthful minstrel. When the "Minstrelsy" appeared, Scott had been "making himself," as his guide and companion Shortreed expressed it, during their rides in Liddesdale. Like his Border protégé, Mungo Park, and with the enthusiasm of his friend Leyden-the lamp of varied lore, too early quenched -he had broken almost untrodden ground, and explored regions of poetry and romance, rich in unsuspected treasures. "Odd," said Dandie Dinmont to the housekeeper of Lady Singleside, when hospitably inviting her to Charlie's Hope, "odd, but ye maun take a pony o'er the Limestone rig-deil a wheeled carriage ever gaed into Liddesdale." Whether "riding the wan water," breast high, when the border streams were coming down in spate, or emerging from mist or snowdrift to seek quarters for the night at lonely hill-steadings, Scott was passionately in love with adventure, and devoted to the study of humanity. We do not know that the germs of all the novel-plots are to be found in the "Minstrelsy," but everywhere we see the suggestions for the picturesque and dramatic episodes. Assuredly we have the secrets of the marvellous facility

and versatility which took the world by storm, when success followed success with breathless rapidity till strength succumbed to labor and troubles. Late in life, he wrote of his clever imitators, when he had been skimming their novels in a postchaise, "Ecod, it was lucky we got the start of those fellows"; but that entry in the diary goes on to congratulate himself, that whereas they had to hunt up their facts and stage properties, he had the one at his finger-ends and the other within easy reach. There was the grand secret. He had the genius of selection. He had accumulated stores of knowledge in a retentive and peculiar memory. It assimilated and stereotyped all that suited his purposes. Of the tenacity of his memory there are remarkable examples. The Ettrick Shepherd was complaining that he had lost the manuscript of a song he had written. Scott said smilingly, "Take your pencil, Jamie, I think I can give it you." He had only heard it once and many years before, but he dictated it, word for word. It is even more suggestive of that gift that when his brain was failing, when the old chords vibrated to the sight of some battlefield or fortalice, he would croon long stanzas of appropriate ballads.

Fancy was ever coming to the aid of memory. He remembered not only what he had seen, but recalled what he had imagined. He tells himself

how, passing through Yorkshire, he had peopled the rude Saxon keep of Coningsburgh with such a gathering as had flocked to the funeral of Athelstane. Much more then did he vividly realize scenes comparatively modern. In the gayest company he was given to fits of abstraction, and the inspiration he could not have controlled if he would was always transporting him into realms of fancy. He was the most genial of companions on that cruise to the Shetlands to which we are indebted for "The Pirate," but we are told by Erskine, his dearest friend, that there were times when he would stand apart, wrapt in meditation, and then no one of his intimates ventured to intrude upon him. He threw off such scenes in the poems of chivalry as the story of Flodden, when his blood had been boiling at fever heat. "I had many a grand gallop on these braes when thinking of Marmion," he said regretfully to Lockhart, "but a canny trotting pony must serve me now." And he was ever refreshing familiar recollections, and preparing for next morning's work, when thinning his young plantations with his faithful henchman, Tom Purdie. The chroniclers and historians were at hand in his library, but we fancy no master of the lighter literature ever had less need for books of reference, till he set himself to slave at the Life of Napoleon, with a pencil in his teeth and the note-book in his left hand.

That memory of his seized on all that was most picturesque in scenery or incident, on all that was most graphically illustrative of character. What strikes us most forcibly in Scott is his intuitive and introspective grasp of historical personalities. They pass before us in the Novels in a lifelike panorama, and the traits of the Scotsmen, with scarcely an exception, are to be clearly traced in the historical Ballads or the notes. For some, as for

Claverhouse, the romantic old Cavalier showed an eccentric, we might say a perverse, predilection, which struggled in vain with his calmer judgment. Yet he strove to be fair, and seldom tampered with his serious convictions, though the poetry in the temperament would get the better of the prose.

Croker, who was no bad judge, said, after a merry evening at Carlton House, that the best raconteurs he had ever listened to were Walter Scott and the King. Sometimes, as Scott himself admitted, he would give a story a cocked hat and gold cane; sometimes, as he confessed of Caleb Balderstone's housekeeping, he would sprinkle the parsley somewhat freely over the chicken. But never had anyone so sure a flair for a story that could be told effectively-for an incident that could be developed dramatically. No matter whether it were mythical, legendary, or historical, sensational, humorous, or superstitious. In the volumes of the "Minstrelsy" we are perpetually stumbling upon notes which were to be expanded; on casual allusions to the stirring life of old Scotland, which were afterwards to be wrought up into his most thrilling scenes. Often, in poem or novel, he repeats the very phrases that had taken his fancy-phrases specially illustrative of the thought or manners of the time and indeed there are few writers of such originality and fertility who have more frequently plagiarized on themselves in so many trivial details. We may accept Lockhart's dictum with some slight reserve. No one was more familiar with his father-in-law's writings, and moreover there were innumerable conversations in his memory which came in by way of commentary and elucidated the cryptic. In following up his pregnant suggestion, our remarks must necessarily be desultory. Heroic and chivalrous types always appealed to Scott's enthusiasm