sible for the defense of New York. Sometimes millions well invested save a good many more in tribute or in hasty, ineffective expenditure.

Within the ramparts is a quadrangle of perhaps half an acre in well-kept lawn, giving no suggestion of a fortress other than the tunnellike passages into the counterscarp, the winding stairways leading up to the casemates, and the glimpse of the defenses visible through the sally port which frames a picture of the approach to the Narrows that is ever changing as the ships go by. The walls are green with the stains of years, grass is thick upon the roof covering. Inside the casemates the men there quartered are awaiting call to guard duty, smoking, playing cards, or snooz

and said he would send her an animal soon after he got home. Jessie uneasily requested further particulars, but, beyond his first threat, Hiram maintained a diplomatic silence-more from uncertainty, I believe, than from a wish to be very

secret.

Well, Hiram afterward wrote us that he had had a capital time in New York, and of course this was pleasant to know, but not a word of the impending "animal" was in his first letter.

A month later came a second letter to Jessie, which said only:

"DEAR COUSIN JESSIE: The animal' will arrive soon

after this letter. It will begin to sing early, but I hope it will not disturb your slumbers enough to be troublesome.

66

"What can it be ?" exclaimed Jessie. Probably a canary; it would be just like Hiram to send you an Andreasburg' in a gorgeous cage," mother suggested.

"That would be nice," assented Jessie from the bottom of her polite, considerate heart; for I happen to know that up to this particular instant Jessie had hated canaries, and had frequently said not only that they were a nuisance to care for, but moreover were conspicuously lacking in both affection and sense. In this we all heartily concurred, but that was before the canary was en route to our cheerful flat. We were destined to remain firm in our original opinion, however. The next day a big, burly expressman appeared at our own particular front door, and said:

"It's a rooster, I have in a crate downstairs. What will I do wid 'im ?"

As there is an unwritten law that roosters are not allowed in the halls of an apartment house, we had to say, with as much composure as could be summoned at short notice:

"Bring it right upstairs, please."

So in a few moments the expressman reappeared, bearing a huge crate, and in it was a fine young rooster. Our new pet was evidently soliloquizing, and expressing his strong disapproval of the whole affair.

Well, it was taken to the kitchen and laughed over. Then, over its cage, Jessie vowed to pay Hiram back for his joke.

But we laughed most at the dinner table. Just before dinner Jessie secretly placed the crate and "crater" under the table. When the bell rang we all went out to the dining room, the boys with evening papers in their hands, for they still had their eagle eyes on the President; and the Hawaiian controversy furnished a theme for endless discussion. I couldn't say to any of them, "What's the news?" or "How are you?" without their saying: "Well, I don't know as the government wants it, but I hope England won't get it, that's She wants the earth." Then I have to explain that my remark was only a friendly salutation, and not an inquiry as to those tiresome islands.

all.

But the rooster! It had the sense to remain quiet till all of the boys were glancing at the headlines in the evening papers. Then Jessie reached one hand under the table and gave our new pet a gentle little poke. The rooster responded gently.

The boys looked perplexed. A more vigorous poke aroused it fully to the situation, and it began a monologue of considerable length and spirit, but it was quite lost in the burst of laughter and the breathless explanations that followed the discovery of a sturdy young rooster, in a crate, under the table, in the dining room of a New York flat.

This morning, at half past six, I was awakened by its-its cheerful carol, which somehow chimed in with the metre of the jolly little song that Rosina Vokes used to sing, "His heart was true to Poll," by which I mean that it was a "cock'-adoo'dle-doo" with a prolonged rendering of the word "Poll," or the final "doo," whichever version you prefer.

Although there was a ripple of laughter from every occupied room in the flat whenever that ridiculous bird chose to lift his voice in song, man may smile, and smile, and be a villain," for there was murder in our hearts. To-day our butcher will call for Hiram's "animal," and later he will appear among us again, but not under the table.

Jessie has recanted her heresies, and has resumed her original stand in regard to canaries. Meanwhile we are plotting revenge on Hiram.

THE fiat had gone forth. The destruction of a world was impending. Its time had come, as seedtime follows harvest. It had in its time evolved out of chaos and darkness at the word of command; it had passed through all its stages, covering eons of time, and now was about to resolve into nothingness. The space it had filled would know it no more. It would hold nothing where once a world had been.

For days there was a hush and a stillness and a sense of an impending something that could not be defined as danger, yet every soul felt it, and none knew what it was or whence it came. The winds ceased to blow. A misty haze covered the earth and hid the sun, yet was not dense enough to be called fog. The leaves on the trees hung motionless, and the rivers became sluggish; the ocean heaved with long, rolling motions, and the waves languidly lapped the shore instead of bounding in restless endeavor. Birds sat bewildered in unaccustomed places, and animals whined or snuffed the air uneasily.

But all persons in all countries went about their accustomed avocations as usual, even while laboring under the strange feeling that oppressed them.

It began down in the depths of the ocean. The molten fires must find a new outlet. There had once been a submarine volcano there, and this volcano had left, when its fires had been temporarily quenched, a few blackened islands formed of molten stone, lava and scoria; islands more barren and desolate than human mind can conceive. Those great smoke-blackened rocks flew asunder, and long tongues of flame burst into the air, carrying with them huge rocks that had formed a portion of the earth's crust, and molten matter of every description, tossing them around as if child's playthings. The fiery stream, as it passed through the deep waters, made a funnel of the steam, through which it passed to a height unknown. And when this submarine volcano had piled other mountains of rock and scoria in place of those demolished a rock broke through, a fissure was made-a something had happened and the water of all the ocean rushed in to quench the eternal fire in the centre of the earth. The two elements fought a giants' battle. The water poured in; the fire formed it into steam and tried to force it out. The steam followed every line affording a passage; it worked its way hundreds, thousands of miles, and then found vent and burst mountains asunder, rent valleys, awakened to new life old and extinct vol

canoes, and forced the active ones to more terrible and destructive fury. And all this while each new convulsion let in greater volumes of water and generated new and greater forces. The crust of the whole earth now trembled; mountains crashed down into hollows; rivers sent clouds of steam along their banks; the ocean bubbled and sent up spouts of steam miles high in a thousand places. Great fish, monsters hitherto unseen, writhed in agony or floated dead upon the surface.

In all lands, in all countries and among all nations there was wild supplication and prayer, and people rushed to and fro in fright like ants whose nest was being destroyed. Children cried to their parents; parents prayed to God, to the Great Spirit, or to idols, according to their teachings. Some rushed upon others, and there were scenes of bloody sacrifice to heathen gods to avert the calamity.

Here would be a man with an unfinished book, or picture, or some other work, which he had fondly hoped would perpetuate his name. There another would try to save his gold, or a woman a bundle of her belongings which she could not bear to lose.

In the confusion, while houses were falling, waters drying up and death and destruction imminent, some would rob others by violence, forgetting there was no place to flee to for safety. Hunger and thirst were everywhere. Ships rocked on the seething waters or were engulfed in the upheavals. Some people prayed, some wept, some tried to flee, some went mad, and some lay down and died from sheer fright. Wives looked to their husbands in vain for protection; dumb brutes whined in vain to their masters; the aged and feeble were trampled on; and the hoarse groans of dying men, the shrill cries of despairing women and the pitiful wails of children, the unearthly screams of animals as they rushed madly to and fro, and the wild shrieks of the birds as they fluttered and fell in the scalding steam, mingled until they blended in one hideous sound; and the air reeked with the odor of putrefaction.

Now the valleys sank still deeper, and steam burst from millions of crevices, and the subterranean fires were roused to ungovernable fury by the insidious steam, that grew stronger the fiercer the fires. The frozen, icebound regions were melted by the heat of the volcanoes and the new force of steam engendered in the centre of the earth, and the crash of mountains, the bursting

of new volcanoes, were like the gunshots in a battle. The heat was overpowering, and one by one the feeble gave way and died, while others rushed around in the vain search for safety, and the dearest of home ties were forgotten in this awful hour. In all lands, in all islands, on all seas, it was the same. Destruction was written over all.

One by one the most beautiful and the most enduring works of man crumbled away like a pile of sand. The united cries of all the people on the earth were unheard; their united prayers were unanswered, and singly and in piles they lay dying or dead. Then one greater upheaval

and rending, a denser volume of steam and smoke, and after that one moment of utter quiet and stillness, followed by the cataclysm that burst the world into fragments, which went flying off into immeasurable space, leaving no trace of its previous existence, leaving nothing to show for the toils and labors of so many millions of beings; nothing to show of the ambitions of men, the pains of women, nothing of its own beauty; resolved into dust, perhaps to gather again at Supreme command and form another world-perhaps to float in particles forever through boundless infinity of space.

66

EVEN after this lapse of years, although my surroundings are studiously kept cheerful, it is with reluctance that I recall the incident, lest the recollection, if dwelt upon, should cause a return of the unhappy mental state in which was fostered my susceptibility to a kind of terror that finally mastered me.

It is not possible for me to begin my recital at the proper beginning, for who can locate the long-dormant impression (so slight perhaps as never to have affected the normal consciousness) that, when awakened by association, becomes in an excited mind the germ of a hallucination?

At that time of my always happy married life my wife and I were very poor. My salary as a telegraphic-news editor on a morning newspaper would have maintained us very well, but the greater part of it was applied weekly to the cancellation of a debt under the burden of which Vol. XXXVII., No. 3-24.

neither of us could have rested easily without the knowledge that we were constantly diminishing it. My wife cheerfully bore her part of the privation to which we were reduced, carefully adjusting our expenses to our abilities to the very cent.

So many were the little sacrifices made by my wife without complaint that I deemed it but fair to deny myself the luxury of riding home. from my work at night. Pretending to her that the exercise was good for me, I walked from the office, after the newspaper had gone to the press, to our house, which was far in the suburbs. It was a very small but neat residence, which we had taken because of the cheapness of the rent.

My wife's economical arrangements allowed me the indulgence of a mug of beer each night after my work. The hour between two o'clock in the morning and that of my starting upon my long homeward walk was the one period of relaxation