recting the progress of the elephants. All wanted their pay, which was in the great coffer on the shoulders of the trumpeter of Baal. Many threatened to turn back. Others howled at the captains, showing their bones and sores, crying out that the officers should not be fatter and warmer than the privates. The slingers even approached the litters of our women, naming the names of the wretched females who had followed them from Spain, and now were coughing and freezing at the tail of the army. For such scum they. wanted the furs, mantles, and braziers of our companions. Of these men the general hewed down the spokesman while we others were still breaking the ice about our sword-hilts. A single javelin was thrown; but that one, glancing from my helmet, entered the curtain of her litter, and pierced her through the shoulder. And we could not stop the blood, so the warmth left her, and she froze to death quickly, and was no more. Later, when the ringleaders had been crucified on the ice, and the money distributed among the rest, I got from the general the great coffer, and laid her in it, and now sink it deep into the snow. Thus Laomedon, son of Cretheus, of Cerasus, captain of the Grecian company, in memory of Nephele called the Golden. From Athens to New Carthage, from New Carthage to these eternal snows, she followed me, renouncing perfumes, flowers, the marble bath, and the riches of her own house, nor was ever dismayed by sun or cold, battle or famine. So the gods punish a too great felicity! These words from a broken heart, which seeks sharp death in the first onset with the Romans. Aphrodite remember that one who served her well, and is now among the shades!'"

Alexandre lowered his head. Out of doors even the crickets were silent.

"And before I drew back the wrappings, I was jealous of that man who had died twenty-one hundred-odd years ago!"

For a while he mused, with vacant eyes, plowing his fingers through his beard, swaying slightly in his chair. Finally he said: "I shall not go on. You would never believe. Think me drunk, but not mad." Once more he began to wander round the room, lurching against the cabinets and bookcases, fingering in a haphazard way precious, fragile objects that he would

LXXXVII-2

never have forgiven himself for dropping. He found himself beside my chair. Clutching my shoulder, he leaned over, and, his last resolution forgotten, mumbled:

"See, thou, she was all white-deadwhite from head to foot, eyelids, lips, nails, marble-pallid-all except her golden hair, and a deep wound here in the right pectoralis major, crimson, fresh crimson. Frozen, and as fresh as if she had died yesterday!

"Beautiful? The poignant beauty of a vanished race, all shining there, all saved for the despair of modern eyes, through the long centuries, in the depths of the glacier!

"At that moment I knew that I had never loved any one else, that I would never love any one else. All the love of my life went forth to this woman out of the past, this pale perfection that had not stirred since our countries ceased to be wildernesses. For me she epitomized the far-off ages for which I had always yearned-their beauty, their spirit, their strange secrets, their whole obliterated knowledge. It was as if all I had ever longed for lay there embodied, how close, and yet how completely inaccessible, baffling with its white immobility the communion I had always dreamed of. In that hour I was bereaved of the one woman and the one reason for existence."

Alexandre regained his chair, and poured out more brandy.

"That night! A storm had come up. The hut shook; the light flickered; hail rattled on the roof; thunder reëchoed from the heights. In a storm she had died, and in another storm

"My poor wretch of a guide was crouching in a corner, praying. This business had broken down his nerves. I. for my part, knelt beside her, staring and staring. Perhaps I wept. No doubt. Maybe I kissed her lips. Who can say?

"I am not sure when the idea, the insane inspiration, began to grow in my brain-" He leaned over to take my nerveless hand- "Look here, do you remember our studies together in the university? How often you sat there beside me while I was busy with my biology and vivisection? Have you forgotten Blondell, who in 1825 proved that animals apparently dead from loss of blood could be revived within a limited time by transfu

sion? Do you recall those dogs I bled to death, and resuscitated, within the fiveminute limit, with Aveling's apparatus, by new blood from other dogs? All those processes, the direct and the indirect, the auto-transfusion by ligatures, and so on? And the monkey I froze solid, after draining his veins sufficiently to relieve the pressure when his blood congealed, and brought to life next day by warming and a new infusion? There in the hut beside the glacier I remembered all that."

His voice fell, as if he were afraid of what he was going to say:

"An exsanguinated patient who had been frozen swiftly, whose every fiber was undoubtedly the same as at the moment of freezing, one day for the monkey, seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand-odd days for the woman. What difference? In such cold, flesh remains the same for

ever.

"I went to work. Imagine, for example-"

He began to laugh, at first with eery softness, soon wildly, rocking from side to side in the throes of an hysteria the more dreadful because it racked so big and strong a man. I came round to him quickly, caught him by the shoulders, began to shake him.

"Alexandre, be still!"

"Ho! ho! ho! Ho! ho! ho! Imagine that wretched hut, the laboratory for the most tremendous operation man has ever seen! Ho! ho! ho!"

His demonic hoots resounded. Through the ceiling came the scraping of a chair. She had heard him? She was coming down? If she entered that door now! My teeth began to chatter. My scalp stirred. I went on shaking him desperately. Our shadows, swaying back and forth, glided over the walls in monstrous shape, over the glimmering shelves, over the mummy on the table by the windows, which seemed, in that alternation of light and gloom, to be stirring, to be writhing into life.

"Alexandre! Alexandre!"

All at once he was silent. He reached for his glass, but I held his hand away. For a time his deep chest heaved. Then he said distinctly, in an ordinary tone:

"Do you know, in that hut there was nothing proper to work with-nothing, absolutely. If I had only had Aveling's

machine, or even Roussel's, or a big hypodermic. But nothing! But nothing! Indirect transmission, of course, with every danger of infection, of air, of inadequate assistance. "I routed out my guide. While he was heaping logs on the fire, I explored my medicine-case. Disinfecting-tablets, sterilized gauze, a lancet, by the grace of God a vial of carbonate of ammonia crystal for inhalation in the high altitudes, some teacups of enameled tin, a bit of waxed paper capable of being twisted into a funnel, quill tooth-picks, adhesive tape to bind the quill to the funnel-those were my instruments!

"But for a long time I waited. In transfusion, a nervous agitation in the donor is sometimes fatal to the patient. I determined to be calm. It was my will to be calm. At last I think I was.

"When the blazing logs before which I had laid her already threatened to char the roof, I made a half-inch incision in my median basilic vein, and let six or seven ounces run into the tea-cups. I bound up my arm, defebrinated the blood by whipping it with twigs and straining it through gauze. I added a solution of ammonia. Over the spirit-lamp I brought this mixture to 110 degrees Fahrenheit. I was a trifle faint by then, mon ami, and somewhat unsteady. It was fortunate that the heat had not yet done its part.

"The roof caught fire. We beat out the flames. The rigidity began to leave her limbs. How long? What is time, or the march of events, at a time like that?

"My guide returned to his corner, and groveled there, gibbering. He believed he had got the devil for a master. At last

at last with my lancet I uncovered the cephalic vein of her left arm, and with a tiny twig for a director raised it. I inserted the quill attached to the funnel. I began the transfusion ounce by ounce, with fifteen-minute intervals.

"The roof caught again. The guide rose, and fought the fire like a man in a delirium.

"In the end the wound in her shoulder became active! I packed it with gauze. I bandaged her limbs to localize the bloodsupply about the central organs. I began to exercise her lungs.

"Look! Look! On her lips a faint color! An hour, an eternity of the most terrible suspense, and her body began al

most imperceptibly to quiver from the natural result, the chill. To quiver! To move of itself! She was alive.

"It was then that my guide rushed out into the storm, screaming, and cast himself down the glacier.

"Two weeks later I found a mountaineer, whom I sent for help. Men came with a stretcher. We took her down into the lowlands.”

Perhaps a minute passed in which neither of us moved. The nightingales resumed their. song. The moon had risen; its light poured in through the windows. to bathe in silvery-green radiance the mummy on the table and the images of obsolete divinities. A sigh broke the stillness. Then Alexandre's voice went on:

"If the soul exists, where had that soul been? What regions did it relinquish at the command of the reviving body? With what regrets, blotted out from consciousness at reëntrance into the flesh?

"One who has loved can doubtless love again and in new places; but old loves persist in memory. Better perhaps not to wake, when waking means remembrance of what is lost.

"But man thinks of his own heart first, as woman, more often than not, thinks first of man's, comforting, reassuring, pretending, out of her vast gentleness and charity, while concealing deep within her a pitiable despair. Who knows?

"At least I have lived a life such as no man ever lived before. My wildest longings have been realized. I have merged myself, as it were, with the past I love so well. Hand in hand with a sure guide, I have retraced my way across obliterated paths to remote days. The moon has risen for me over the roofs of Athens. My ship has drawn in beneath the starlit bulk of Carthage. I have supped and marched. with the great dead. I have heard the songs of a world that is gone, that no other will ever hear-the elegiac melodies of the Libyan flute, the lyric utterances of the seven-stringed lyre, without which Pindar, Anacreon, Simonides, Bacchylides are a sealed book. I live amid the sounds and odors, the knowledge and very presence, of the past. And all the while, in the midst of a frightful delight, I have a frightful apprehension; for I have outraged nature, destiny, the sane progress of

the universe. What will happen to me for that?

"And that other! Where is he? Close by, invisible in the shadows? Is he calling now? Could that heart of hers, purified by its long absence in unknown spaces, be half aware of such a message? Is it just as a prisoner that I keep her here, a being brought back by force, smiling at her captor with the sad wisdom of one whose inner self knows everything, bearing the chains of this poor, human selfishness with the meekness of a divine comprehension?" He wept, the tears running down into his beard.

"Nearly every night I find her out there, looking through the darkness toward the old places. No doubt she is there at this moment."

He stood erect, and staggered into the pergola. Below, amid the roses, her tall shape stood motionless. Her gaze was turned toward the east. Alexandre went toward her, his hands outstretched, sobbing: "No more to-night! No more!"

Turning, she caught him in her white arms. His head sank upon her shoulder: his grief was muffled by her breast. So she supported him, swaying, but standing upright. Her face showed like a mask, ineffably beautiful, of Pity herself. I heard his smothered voice:

"Be content! For charity, say thou wilt be content-"

Her eyes met mine. They remained, as before, shining with that sublime, sad gentleness. She addressed him very softly: "Come! To bed."

But he went on, shaken by his parox

ysm:

"The crime I have committed against thee!"

"Be silent now! Come! To bed."
She led him into the house.
Deranged?

It is possible, of course, that just at that time he was suffering from some nervous breakdown, full of imaginings related to his work and dreams. But there remained the mystery of the woman, which is still a mystery to me.

Was it coincidence, or a cue for a whole fabric of delusion on his part, that on her left arm, somewhere, I should judge, in the region of the cephalic vein, one saw a tiny scar not yet altogether white?