my brothers," said Ivor, his voice softening, "how comes it that we have lost faith in the heart, the mind, the brain of Humanity? Why must we turn, like wild beasts, to our fangs and our claws, to the poison of the rattlesnake and the teeth of the tiger?"

"Why?" exclaimed one who had not yet spoken; “because we are fighting with tigers and rattlesnakes. How else are we to conquer?"

"Your conception of humanity, then," said Ivor, "does not include the governing classes. Have all revolutionists been ignorant? have all sprung from the people? You invert the pyramid; but your anarchy is only aristocracy turned upside down. You want the guillotine, the infernal machine, the flask of nitroglycerin as the Governments want their hangman and their headsman. Oh, worthy successor of Robespierre, I congratulate you."

"Robespierre was the greatest and holiest of revolutionists, always excepting Marat," answered the other sullenly.

Ivor was not to be daunted. He went on with his theme. "How did Robespierre differ from Torquemada?" he inquired. “Their views of the next world might not be the same, but they were pretty much of a mind in dealing with this. If the Jesuits were regicides on principle, were the Jacobins any better? A fine revolution," he exclaimed, "when you change the men, but carry out the measures more obstinately than before; when you snatch the people from the lion's mouth to fling them to jackals and hyenas! You tell me that force alone will conquer force. It was not by force that Christianity won its way to Empire. When it took up the sword it struck, indeed, a deadly blow, but into its own heart. Are we going to repeat the mistake, and abolish the principles of '89 by the guillotine of '93? Conquer force by force? Not in this battle, be you sure of that. It is a battle against darkness, and only light will scatter it. Therefore I conclude," he said, raising his voice and speaking with impassioned earnestness, "that the resolution which would commit our lodge to a policy of dynamite is nothing short of apostasy from the principles on which it was founded; and I, for one, will dare or endure the utmost rather than assent to it."

"What will you put in its stead?" The question rang

out clear through the room, drawing every eye towards the speaker, who had come in while Ivor was replying to the interruptions of his opponents. He was a tall man, wrapped in a cloak with which until now he had covered his face where he sat by the door. At the sound of his voice Ivor gave a start. Rupert, looking that way, saw the man rise from his seat and press towards the tribune. He let his cloak fall, and from that moment the artist's eyes were riveted on his pale and haughty countenance. Again, as at the beginning of Ivor's speech, there was complete silence, and the men present looked at one another in expectation of something unusual. Ivor, standing up while the stranger passed, made no attempt to resume. The stillness became intense.

"You are debating a question to-night," said the stranger, as he looked at them from the tribune he had mounted, "on which the future of the world hangs. Let me help you to solve it. All the lodges in Europe have been debating it too, since a certain afternoon when the telegraph brought news from Petersburg. The French Revolution has become cosmopolitan; the nations are on the march, and they must have their '93. Anarchy first, then order. When France challenged the kings to battle, it flung them the head of a king. We have done more; we are going to pull down the Europe of the kings, with all its wealth, feudalism, ranks, and classes, till we have swept the place clean. And," he paused, "our gage of battle is the shattered body of the Tsar."

There could be no mistaking how the applause went now. It was violent and vociferous. The stranger hardly seemed to notice it. When silence was restored he went on in a musing voice, low but exceedingly distinct, as if speaking to himself. "When I was a boy I too had my dreams,' he said, and he glanced towards Ivor. "I believed in Goethe and Voltaire, in Victor Hugo and the sentimentalists. I thought the struggle was for light. I see it is for bread. Look out in the streets to-night and consider the faces that pass. Beyond these walls," his voice sank lower, but it was wonderfully clear throughout, "lies the anarchy of London. Rags, hunger, nakedness, tears, filth, incest, squalor, decay, disease, the human lazar-house, the black death eating its victims piecemeal,-that is three-fourths

of the London lying at these doors. Whose care is it? Nay, who cares for it? The piles of the royal palace are laid deep in a lake of blood. And you will leave it standing? You talk of light; you prefer sentiment to dynamite and assassination! What a meek Christian you are!"

"No," returned Ivor, with heightened color in his face, "I am neither meek nor a Christian. The lake of blood is a terror to me as to you. That is not the question. You know me too well to imagine it," he said almost fiercely. "The question is whether a second anarchy will cure a first. I say no. I prefer sentiment to assassination? Very well, why should I not? But I prefer reason and right even to sentiment. I appeal to what is deepest in the heart of man."

The stranger laughed unpleasantly and resumed, as though dismissing the argument. "I have seen battles," he said, "in which there were heroism, and madness, and the rush of armies together, and the thunder of cannon, and wild, raging cries in the artillery gloom, enough to intoxicate a man with the bloody splendors of war. But I never beheld anything more heroic or glorious "—he smiled, his voice fell, and he gave a long, peculiar glance down the hall-" than the overture to our great enterprise. It cost many days to think it out; it was accomplished in a moment." Then, in the strange, musing tone of one that has a vision before him, "I saw him stagger, lean his arm against the parapet, and fall, shattered as with a thunderbolt. It was not the death of a man; it was the annihilation of a tyranny!"

"And the springing up of a fresh tyranny from his blood," cried Ivor, unable, amid the cheering of the others, to contain himself.

"Ah, it was a fine sight," continued the speaker, as though he had not been interrupted, "and new in its kind. The great White Tsar has often been murdered-by his wife, his son, his brother; Nicholas committed suicide, and so did Alexander the First. But never until now have the people done justice on their executioner."

Then in the same quiet voice, where passion was so concentrated that it gave only a dull red intensity of expression, but none of those lyric cries that lift up the soul, he recited, without naming person or place, the tragedy of

which he had been a witness and one of the prime movers. No sound of protest came while he was speaking. The audience hung spellbound on his words; and the somber, sanguinary picture unrolled itself in all its dreadfulness before their vision. Like a tragic messenger, he told the tale graphically, yet as though he had no part in it; but the conviction, unanimous in that meeting, of the share he had taken added a covert fear, a wonder not unmixed with something almost loathsome, as the man stood there, his hands clean, but the scent of blood clinging to his raiment. Ivor listened, his head bowed down, motionless. Rupert never once turned his eyes from the stranger, who moved along the lines of the story swiftly, quietly, painting with lurid tints, and not pausing till he had shown the mangled remains of the victim wrapped in his bloody shroud.

"That was not all the blood spilt in the tragedy," he concluded. "We, too, lost our soldiers, but they were willing to die. And now that you have seen the deed through my eyes, judge whether it was rightly done."

66

Stay," said Ivor, rising again, and in his agitation leaning heavily upon Rupert's shoulder, “before you judge let me ask on what principles your verdict is to be founded. Will you take those of the Revolution, or return to those of Absolutism?"

"The Revolution, the Revolution," cried many voices. "One of them," returned the young man, "is fraternity. Where did his murderers show pity to the Tsar? Another is humanity, to employ the arms of reason to enlighten blindness, not strike it with the sword. Must war be perpetual, or where is retaliation to cease? I have always thought that pardon, light, and love were the watchwords of our cause; and I looked forward to the day when men should live in peace with one another. To be a man, I understood, was to bear a charmed life, on which no other man should lay a daring hand. Murder, I was told, is sacrilege. Am I now to unlearn all these truths, and join the crusade of dynamite-throwers instead of the crusade of reason? That is the counter-revolution indeed. I, for one, will have nothing to do with it. Take my vote, which condemns anarchy, whether in the heights or in the depths, and let me go."

ROBERT BELL.

(1800-1867.)

ROBERT BELL was born at Cork in 1800. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he originated the Dublin Historical Society. He settled in London in 1828, and soon became editor of The Atlas, then one of the largest London weeklies, which he long conducted with success. He contributed 'The History of Russia' and 'The Lives of English Poets' to Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia.' He assisted Bulwer and Dr. Lardner in establishing The Monthly Chronicle and became its editor.

·

He wrote 'The Life of Canning,' 'Wayside Pictures through France, Belgium, and Holland,' three plays, and two novels; but his best work, an annotated edition of the English Poets from Chaucer to Cowper, he left incomplete. Later in life he edited The Home News. He became interested also in spiritualism, and_contributed papers on Table-rapping' to the Cornhill Magazine. He was a prominent member of The Literary Fund.'

Ranelagh was in its meridian glory about the middle of the eighteenth century. The crowds of people it drew westward, streaming along the roads on horseback and afoot, suggested to some enterprising spectator the manifest want of a place of half-way entertainment that might tempt the tired pleasure-hunter to rest a while on his way home, or, perhaps, entice him from the prosecution of his remoter expedition on his way out. The spot was well chosen for the execution of this sinister design. It lay between Brompton and Kensington, just far enough from town to make it a pleasant resting-point for the pedestrian, and near enough to Ranelagh to make it a formidable rival. Sometimes of a summer's evening there might be heard the voices of brass instruments, coming singing in the wind over the heads of the gay groups that were flaunting on the highroad, or through the fields on their excursion to Ranelagh; and sometimes, decoyed by the sound, they would follow it, thinking they had mistaken the path, and never discover their mistake until they found themselves in the bosky recesses of Florida Gardens.