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water are divided by the long black line of jungle, are things I am powerless to describe.

We were going over to the mainland last week, and had to wait for the water to rise before we could pass. The sun had set, and there was a tiny shaving of new moon which gave no light, but the stars were brilliant in sky and river. Above us the black branches were full of yellow sparks. Each jungle tree was alight with fireflies, and the glow of them pulsed, as if they were all charged with electric current. Fairy Christmas trees! . .

Last night when I crossed the ferry the sunset was particularly beautiful on the river, and having reached our side, where the rubber begins immediately, I turned the car lights on, so heavy were the shadows. It was nearly seven o'clock, and the tropical night was rushing down.

To my consternation I found, after a moment or so, that there was something the matter with the battery. The lights went out. There was nothing for it but to go on as quickly as possible without them. Seven black miles lay before

me.

A native servant accompanied me, but he knew nothing of driving. The estate road is of earth, with a sharp slope to one side, so that one has constantly to steer the car back. Wide transport canals run on both sides, and at unexpected intervals are bridges

making such angles with the road that driving by day is difficult, and by night without lights a torture.

As it grew darker I slackened the pace, trying to follow the lighter colour of the ruts. So we crawled for nearly four miles. Then a sudden clatter and commotion told me that I had nearly run over some natives who were walking home in the dark. Their dark skins are almost impossible to see at dusk, and at night they might as well be invisible. I pulled up at once. It was the Bengali baker going home with his wives, who were carrying his baking-tins.

It was with an effort that I plucked up courage to start the engine once more. This time I made the boy go ahead a few steps, for we were off the road. He reported that we were headed for the canal on the right, so I climbed up again to the centre of the road. It was not far now to the bungalow of an assistant who lived isolated in the middle of the estate.

The house stood away from the road in a grove of coconuts, where it was not so dark as in the rubber. We could see the yellow streak of his lantern through the trees. I pushed the glass wind-shield up, and stood leaning forward over the wheel straining my eyes to see the ruts, telling the boy to watch for the white bridge over the canal to the bungalow. From time to time I asked him if it were in sight, and the

answer was always, "A little of the jungle night creeping farther, mem."

At last we reached the bridge, felt it rattle under us, and then I drove up to the bungalow, where an oil lantern was swinging in the porch. It was a long drive around the garden, and I could only tell by the scrunching when the car was on the gravel. We pulled up. The assistant was out.

However, we managed to borrow a bicycle lamp and an electric torch. The boy held these, and we went off, over the bridge and down the road, when, about a hundred yards on, the torch gave out. The lamp was an oil one that gave the merest glimmer of a light. I tried to drive with the boy stretched at full length on the running-board, holding the lamp down to the ground. But it was impossible.

Then I made him walk along in front, but the black night engulfed him. So finally I stopped, and shut off the engine. It was useless. There was no moon. It would not be long, I knew, before a search party was sent out for me. In the meantime I must wait.

I put on my coat, as the evening chill was making me shiver, and sat on my feet to keep them from the mosquitoes. Tree frogs were calling, and owls. There were rustlings of jungle creatures all about— snapping twigs, falling rubber seeds and coconuts, and the thousand stealthy movements

around the car. It seemed a long time, though it could not have been above half an hour, when suddenly a coconut tree far away outlined its silhouette against a flash of light.

It was the assistant returning home in his car. We watch his progress for a couple of miles, first a faint twinkle, then a flash, twisting and turning along the road. I sounded my horn frantically. The track was very narrow, and I was afraid that I had not drawn up so up so that he could pass. However, he stopped when he

saw me.

After a brief consultation, he decided that since he could not turn there, he would continue on to his house, turn, and come back. He scraped past, and I saw his lights grow fainter, and then stronger as he passed again. again. He went in front of me, and I followed his rear light. Where the road was bad he went dead slow and gave me time, and where there was a bad corner or a bridge he sounded his horn, which I answered. So we went along the three miles home.

R. was waiting on the steps, on the verge of coming to look for me. Never had I been more thankful to see him. I was so tired that my clothes fidgeted on me. Even dinner did not attract me, belated as it was.

Now we carry a strong torch under the seat of the car in case of accidents.

THE PHANTOM BRIDE.

BY THOMAS WILLIAMS.

ALTHOUGH by no means morbidly inclined, I confess to a lifelong habit of occasionally stepping aside from the thunder and bustle of the streets, and seeking an hour or two of seclusion and quiet thought among the resting-places of the dead. I repeat it is no love of the morbid that impels me to do this-I am as fond of the sunshine, the open air, and the pleasures of the world as most men,-neither is it the hope of finding some rarity in statuary or the chance discovery of a great name. Now and then there comes over me a desire to put the innumerable incidents of everyday life into some sort of order, and so restore a sense of values that our headlong world does so much to destroy. Some men find this possible in the study, others in the country, and yet others in communal worship and hushed congregations; to me it is possible only in the burialgrounds of the dead. It is here, and here alone, in the earth's one oasis of absolute peace, that I find myself able to practise the wise precept that would have us gauge all things from the point of view of eternity. And yet from long familiarity these burial-places have become interesting to me for their own sake. To have seen one, it is true, is to have seen

them all, for in European countries at any rate there is seldom any variation-everywhere the same crosses, the same figures of angels, the tablets, the obelisks, and broken columns ; even the oldest of Jewish graveyards, with their uniform tombstones, bear a striking resemblance to the most modern of our crematoria. Ornament, epitaph, and inscription, they also never seem to vary; it would seem as though death, the great leveller of men and women, had here laid a paralysing hand on human invention too. Only once have I seen a tombstone that was outstanding; its design still pulsed with the strength of its creator, and the inscription was like a voice in a dead silence.

for

I had lived in Hseveral years, and visited the great cemetery many a time before I became aware of the tombstone of which I speak. It was in the upper, and I presume the older, part, and if you passed through the stately entrance and bore away along the path leading to the right, you would find it hidden away behind some pretentious vaults and overhung by an old ash-tree. Having approached from another direction, I was still some fifty yards away when I first caught sight of it, and at that distance I took it

to be a slender and, of course, broken column. But as I drew near, it seemed to undergo a strange transformation, and as though imbued with life, it gradually resolved itself into the trunk of a young tree. The whole was done in white marble, and the roots were embedded in a not too large base stone or pedestal of the same material. The sapling rose gracefully to a height of five or six feet, where a giant hand had seemingly wrenched off the upper part, and left hanging only shreds of bark and a solitary bough in leaf. I had barely time to dwell on the grand yet not utterly hopeless conception of a life cut short, when another and more striking peculiarity of the stone attracted my attention. Sunk in the bark was a smooth spiral several inches wide, extending from the roots to the solitary bough, and bearing what appeared to be a legend in wonderful tracery. Starting from below, I saw the figure of a young woman in her early twenties, clad in a loose robe, her hair falling in waves on her shoulders. She stood at a halfopen door, which, with its pointed arch and heavy studs and bars, suggested a church or a castle. There was a vista of woodland and rolling meadows, and a few stars in the sky showing it was night. As the spiral curved round the tree, design was replaced by ornament, only to appear again half-way up the stem. To my surprise, it was still the same

night scene of woodland and meadow and the half- open church or castle door; the position and figure of the woman were also the same, but her features were now furrowed with age, and her hair hung straight on her shoulders. I looked at the third and the last design. For the setting I had no eyes, for I saw at a glance it was unchanged; but the girl! She stood once more in the flower of her days, and her hair was quick again with those glorious waves. The rest was conjecture, for the hand that had broken the marble had left the legend unfinished and the story untold.

It may have been the door that suggested the Middle Ages, but I ransacked my memory in vain for a mediæval tale that was here portrayed. I examined the stone more closely, and at the foot of the pedestal, almost hidden by the rank growing grass, I found this faded inscription, Margaret, 1831-1895: Age 23," and underneath in Italian, “La Sposa Fantasma," which meant in English, "The Phantom Bride." I could discern nothing further, neither family nor place-name; it was as though the survivor had willed that the statuary alone should tell the story, but yielding at the last moment to our more than human weakness for the written word, had added an inscription that halfrevealed and yet half-veiled the meaning. The old world theme of a bride who had grown old and become young

again would have interested yet the Italian of the inscripme little; the dates, however, pointed to an actual occurrence of a bare half-century ago, and in the nearness of the event and the deliberate misreckoning, "1831-1895: Age 23," I half sensed some underlying fact that would give new beauty and perhaps added truth to the ancient legend.

tion pointed to something more than mere coincidence, and the year 1854 to a disaster that was common to both. My only hope of an explanation lay in a chance meeting with one of the survivors who had erected the tomb; but as season followed season and I met no one there, I began to I tore myself away from that fear that the story of the untomb, only to return to it again happy Margaret was lost beand again. I invented a dozen yond recall. Alone my interest explanations for it, but after in the stone remained una week of useless speculation diminished. Around it I saw I found myself no nearer the the pitiful images that undistruth; finally, I consulted the cerning minds and loving hands cemetery records. I confined still cared for, yet here was a my search to the two years masterpiece left utterly to the 1895, the year of Margaret's mercy of the fog and rain. death, and 1854, which, from Irresistibly I was moved to the design and the inscription, take it under my protection, I judged to be the tragic year and with the return of the fine of her life. An entry, dated weather I began to do some 12th December 1895, recorded tentative weeding around the the burial of one Margaret grave, and to consider how L—; her address was given best I could cleanse the marble as the Abbey, H-, but as of the grime of many years. I could find no house of that It was already midsummer bename in the neighbourhood, fore I set about the task, and the information proved of little as stain after stain fell away, value. My one discovery of and I brought the stone nearer the year 1854 that had even to the state in which it had the remotest bearing on my left its sculptor's hands, I search was the burial record began to feel that I was graduof a young Italian gentleman ally removing the veil of the who was mysteriously killed past thirty years, and far from on the heath in November of receding, was once more apthat year, and whose body, proaching its haunting secret. according to a note attached I found it necessary to repeat to the record, was subsequently the cleansing process twice beexhumed for reburial in Italy. fore I brought the stone to His name was Guido Farinelli, a satisfactory condition. I and he, too, was twenty-three cleaned the pedestal, too, and years of age. The connection, the kerb round the grave; it is true, was slender enough, and lingering over the task,

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