heart, I gingerly, and with an eye over my shoulder for Bartlemy the pursuing fiend, turned over on my breast and hugged the beam with the grip of my knees and extended arms.

Hitherto in my more imminent trouble I had not so much noticed the uproar of the bells. True that the tenor roared in his great voice not ten feet from my ear, that the treble bells cried shrilly overhead, and Peter and Paul bawled and bellowed a sonorous harmony; the arched roof and quivering walls reverberated the sound and hurled it out over my body through the louvres into the night. The tower having neither floors nor joists to break the waves, vibrated and redoubled the din like a sounding board. Yet while each spring of my beam was lifting me inches towards the descending bell and those awful circular orifices were dizzily swooping over me like birds of prey, their mere din was the least of my troubles. But now the ringers began to fire the bells, and the volleys discharged over my head like a million of anvils rattling to the sledge, beat into my brain with a fierce remorseless tyranny. They began to ring, what at its third bell I noted with a prescient and appalling plunge into the pit of despair, a Triple Grandsire Major set of changes. These things take hours to execute, and our conceited pedants of ringers bate not a jot of them. And how long would my shaken nerves and tortured muscles hold out?

Minute by minute I lay there sicker and sicker and more and more unstrung. In the voices of the bells and the shrill yelling of the wind, I heard all the demons of the pit shrieking in my ear, "Let go! Let go!" Ceaseless, endless, only more monotonous for its measured variety, came that series of metallic explosions, bursting through the whirlpool of ringing resonance, the débris of each note as it died, and knocking, knocking upon my skull with veritable and agonising blows. I felt my reason totter, and to save myself tried by reflection to win at least a few moments of respite from madness. I shouted with all the force of my throat, but for all my effort could hear not a sound of it. "If I cannot hear myself," said I, "how shall they hear me in the belfry? Yet hear me they must," and I strained my eyes through the gloom. Then an expedient occurred to me, and a spark of hope kindled in my darkness and blazed up like a wisp of straw in a wind. Slowly and painfully I got off one of my heavy boots and then the other, and dropped the first on to the belfry ceiling so far below. The bells rang on; my young hope paled and flickered. "Perhaps the boot fell on the upper side; I must make the heel strike first," I said: "they will hear that;" and carefully I launched my other boot, sole downwards. Still that infernal tumult beat and battered

down upon me, "Curse on the oafs," I screamed inaudibly, "they are drunk, drunk, the sots!" and I lay on my belly and left off to clutch the log and wailed like a newborn child.

How long I remained thus spent and unmanned I know not; but the love of life is strong, and presently, when the light was now well nigh faded out of the sky, a new device was born in my brain. "The second boot as the first," I said to myself, "fell on its soft upper side and bounded off. No wonder they did not hear it. This will fall with a more piercing crack; it may even break a way through some rotten spot in the boards," and detaching my watch from its chain, with a beating heart and all my last remnants of strength and nerve mustered and hanging on the cast, I poised it a moment, opened my fingers and it vanished.

There was a moment's suspense and then all was still. The awful racket in which my torn and harassed brain had reeled and crouched as it seemed through such interminable ages, suddenly ceased. Warm tears gushed from my eyes and lay glittering in the gloom in great drops on the beam, and there I lay panting and whispering, so outworn and feeble that even in that great silence I did not hear my own words, "Thank God! Thank God! my prayer is heard."

But still the tower jerked and swayed, and the wind blew gusty and chill. "I will get to the ladders and go down to meet them," thought I, "perhaps they are gone for a rope," and turning over I half rose to my feet. Great God in heaven! I fell flat again, not by a hair's breadth too soon; the great bells were still beating and bellowing, jangling, swinging and quivering over my head without any pause just as before; and I-I heard not a sound of it, nor shall I ever hear again for evermore till I hear the trumpet of the Judgment Angel.

There then I lay a space longer, whether minutes or hours I knew not, for time was for me no longer; and half in a trance of exhaustion, half in a stupor of despair, I lay all along, and glared hopeless into the vault. But I knew by the pulsing of my perch that the fierce ringing of the bells still was answered by the quivering and jar of the walls and of my beam. Some hidden law of the construction of the building caused my beam to reach its lowest point of vibration, just as Bartlemy swept over it, and when he was inverted at the limit of his swing, then it was that the stay humped itself to its highest. This motion had saved my life, else I must have been cut off into the void a mere shattered heap with the first descent of the bell. And yet why should I have clung to life? at that moment I had as lieve have died. But still the buckling of the stay raised me up and down and

mechanically my despairing fingers clutched it as a strangler gripes his victim.

Suddenly something touched me on the back; then again a finger seemed to be lightly drawn a fraction of an inch across me. I cowered lower and lower at this new terror, and did not feel it a third time. No! there it is again; rhythmically, evenly, inexorably laying itself upon me again and again, as if the angel of death himself were marking me for destruction. At each touch I thought it fell more heavily, nor could I any longer shrink away from that strange ghostly hand. Then I suddenly felt it hot as well as heavy, hot as a hand of fire. The new horror cast out the old, and all my wits bent themselves in the darkness upon that one weird visitation. Ha! I had it. The hours of ringing had heated Bartlemy, and the clapper of the bell was lengthening. Thousands of strokes of iron on iron had made that tongue so hot that it had expanded by little and little, until now it reached down across my little margin of safety, and his-Bartlemy's—was the finger that touched me so rhythmically, pressing heavier and heavier as it reached further and further down, and in very truth the hand was the hand of death. And death looked me straight in the eyes remorseless and uncompromising. Unless heaven intervened to help me, my life was to be measured by minutes, and I was to die by inches.

Perhaps heaven did help me; for now over the shoulder of one of the higher bells, by which it still suffered momentary eclipses, the moon began to shine in on me through the louvres. And as I gazed about for help in the new light with fevered and fearstricken eyes, I caught sight of the nearest of the bell-ropes, running down a quivering silver cord and losing itself in the solid night below. It rose and fell as the brawny ringer's arms pulled it. I looked aloft and saw it was Catherine's, the second bell's rope, and the ringer of Catherine I knew was Roger, my second son. I think that gave me hope, and indeed my peril was now so near, that delay and design would in a moment more be my ruin. My coat was torn to shreds, and a hot furrow was being seared deeper and deeper in my shoulder with every stroke. Slowly, and crouching as close as a lizard, I writhed along the beam. But in this way I could make but little progress, for before my body was clear of the pursuing pendulum of Bartlemy's clapper, the way was cut across by the steady sweep of his neighbour bell, and between that and the beam was no hope of a passage for me. I dropped over the side, and clinging with feet and hands to the underside of the beam, wormed painfully along. I felt the blood buzzing in my head, and my eyeballs swelled almost to bursting; the muscles

stood out upon my legs and arms like cordage, but I knew that the time I could thus hang must be counted by moments. I crossed one leg over the stay and gained some rest, though at every swing the bell's edge cut and cut into the thigh; but that was no time to think of such things; and then in the moonlight I saw one, and one only, desperate way of escape. If I could throw myself on to the stay in the very instant when the two bells, that crossed it just above me, were swinging away in opposite directions, then before they returned I might poise myself, and leaping out into space, clutch my son's bell rope, and sliding down so reach firm footing below. It was a gambler's last throw, and the odds were terrible. From such a feat, requiring the nicest balance of eye and limb, the most instant obedience of the muscle to the will, the fullest force of body and coolest decision of mind, even a gymnast, trained and untired, might shrink. And how was I, deafened and dazed, limp and quivering, nerveless and unstrung, to make that desperate adventure? And what was the penalty of failure? To be nipped and ground between the returning bells and be dropped a lifeless carcase, or leaping, to miss my hold, and falling endlong, to be dashed against the unseen platform far below. But in such a match men do not count the odds or stop to haggle about the stakes with Death. I fixed my eyes upon the bells, and counted and recounted their sweeps till the pulsation was burnt into my brain. Then boldly, yet without haste, I cast myself on to the upper surface of the beam, rose deftly to my feet, poised myself as it switched, and fastened my gaze not on the bells but on the rope. As the rope rose to its topmost limit and paused before its descent, as one bell ended its swing, and the other began its merciless pounce upon its quarry, I crouched and bounded, and my hands closed in death grips upon the cord. My arms strained in their sockets; like a streak of molten iron the rope slid through my palms, burning and tearing them, and then my feet touched the planks below and I was safe. I stumbled and tottered to the ladder, and almost fell into the belfry below. The Triple Grandsire Major was just at an end, and the singers as they dropped their ropes were clustering round my son Roger. He lifted his hand, and his lips moved, and I saw by their motion that he cried, "God save the Queen." The yokels were not prompt to take him up, I reeled into their midst, and lifting my hand too, croaked like a voice from the tomb, "Ay! God save the Queen." With starting eyes and bristling hair they marked my gaunt blanched cheeks, my clothes ragged and blood-bedabbled, and my snow-white beard and hair, and one and all gibbering and aghast, they fled headlong.

VOL. LXXVII.

I

A Blight in May.

I SET a rose-tree by my door,

I looked for bloom in summer hours; The wind blew cold across the moor

And blasted all my opening flowers.

I chose my love and won her troth;
She cut for me her silken hair;
But like my ring she brake her oath,
And left me lone my pain to bear.

O day, when spring and winter met!
O hope, too early nipped with cold!
The golden lock is left me yet,

But dross is all love's promised gold.

My rose may lift its head again,

And summer garlands wreathe my door;
But my true heart has loved in vain;
The wound she gave can heal no more.

WILLIAM WATERFIELD,