well-being. The people have taken the Sunday question into their own hands. How great is the folly of attempting to compel men and women to look upon themselves as conventional sinners when they have not the inner conviction of sin, when their consciences are not disturbed.

That many have over-stepped the bounds and have made Sunday a day of mere pleasure, and even reveling, there can be no doubt. But is one misapprehension ever corrected by another of the opposite sort? If Sabbatarianism were defensible as a principle it might eventually prevail more largely as a practice. To maintain an indefensible Sabbatarianism as a bulwark against an equally indefensible Sunday laxity not only alienates those friendly to a Christian Sunday, but does a grave injustice to the broader principles of religion. If Sunday is to be serviceable to the righteousness that is the heart of religion, if it is to promote that wholesomeness which is the fruit of the divine process of salvation, then Sunday must be a day whose agencies are as broad as the needs of the whole man. And, to-day, the whole man needs his Sunday as he never needed it before, to correct the incompleteness of the week's work. We must never forget that the use of Sunday is not to be judged by the privileges of the fortunate, but by the needs of the vast mass of men and women upon whom the burdens and cares of this world are falling with ever-increasing weight. They are the ones for whom I make my plea.

What likewise shall be the attitude of the Church toward the children? Must the Church be apologetic and weakly admit that, perhaps, a little play on Sunday afternoon is not so very wicked? That is quite different from the practice of the saintly Keble who, in his parish at Hursley, encouraged Sunday cricket. The mind of the child

is intensely set on things modern. The boy is very impressionable to strong religious teaching, but he is intolerant of artificial sins and misty symbolism. He prefers aëroplanes to archangels. Must he be brought up to believe that proper Sunday recreation and a sincere religious life are incompatible?

But the problem is not solved by the Church's assertion of the full freedom of men to use Sunday for such interests as will upbuild them spiritually, mentally, and physically. This attitude, however, brings with it the possibility of finding a solution. The Church will organize and serve with a fresh enthusiasm if it looks upon the liberties of Sunday, not as a concession to laxity, but as a right of men which the Church must assist in maintaining.

And now I seem to hear the fatuous and shallow criticism that this is but another form of the idea, so unjustly attributed to many godly people, that if a man goes to church on Sunday morning he may do what he pleases the remainder of the day. Such a fallacious statement needs no refutation. It is not the doctrine of this article. The real principle of Sunday privilege is on the highest plane in its appeal. It is this. If a man does his duty to God on Sunday, not merely by being present at church, but by active participation. in all the phases of worship, then he may use his Sunday likewise to re-create himself mentally and physically, that he may become the wholesome being through whom the great ideals of worship and character may be applied to the world's work and mediated to his fellow men.

Upon such a principle what would be the Church's attitude toward Sunday baseball, theatres, and moving picture-shows? It is a vital question. There seems but one solution. When the Church, as a whole, has awakened to its full duty; when it shall compel

Any money-making enterprise on Sunday not essential to the continuance of life, or the protection of property over an interval of general cessation from labor, and not necessary to the fulfillment of life's higher purposes, is detrimental to the people and a menace to society.

By this principle would be justified the continuance on Sunday of such vital contributors to our social welfare as the railroads. The stopping of all traffic on Sunday would be a menace to the orderly continuance of industrial activities on week-days. This would bring hardship and privation upon an army of toilers. But by the same principle would be condemned those petty devices by which an avaricious host attempt to enrich themselves in taking advantage on Sunday of man's weakness for amusement.

The practical programme of the Church must be developed from a careful adaptation of its resources and ideals to the actual needs of the community which it serves. Freed from all suspicion of material self-interest, it

must give to each man, in their purest form, the essential things of which he is ordinarily deprived. It must give him religion. That is fundamental. If, to make him more capable of appropriating the benefits of religion, it must also give him physical recreation, even on Sunday, let not the Church shirk its duty. If it finds him dulled and apathetic by reason of the dreary and monotonous labor to which his days are enslaved, then the Church must rise to its opportunity and give him amuse

ment.

The Church alone can do this effectively because it gives likewise that deep interest by which amusement and recreation are transformed into instruments for emphasizing the principle, so often proclaimed but so insufficiently practiced, of the brotherhood of man. It is admitted that the evils of Sunday laxity cannot be entirely eradicated by the activity of the Church. But the Church would accomplish much toward this end by well-directed efforts to make Sunday a cheerful and active day of moral and physical recreation and development for men. That it would thereby regain the respect and allegiance of the masses is certain. The Church faces a great opportunity. To grasp it completely will require patience, courage, and wisdom. Not secularizing a sacred trust, but exercising a lofty privilege, the Church must make Sunday the day for the fullest expression of its purpose to apply the vital spirituality of its Master to all the needs of our common humanity.

We were rather a gay party on the deck of the Professor's dahabeah that moonlight evening at Luxor, but the Captain's story sobered the levity that provoked it, and we broke up in a mood half-pensive, half-constrained, that affected us all, each after his kind. This last naturally, since we were an extremely multifarious lot, thrown together for the moment by the chances of travel.

One of us was known by her own immediate party as the Investigator, and the dinner and the brief general conversation on deck afterward were sufficient to enable the rest of us to understand why. This quite charming young person was obviously the victim of a thirst for information which she slaked by accumulating disconnected data of all kinds. Her preference, however, seemed to be for the marvelous, and she further discriminated in favor of the uncanny.

Our host, the Professor, was a savant, pleasantly tinctured with worldliness, who spent his winters on the Nile; he entertained as easily as he read cursive Greek, and the dinner had been good. Among the rest were Herr Doktor Wissenkraft, a world-renowned reader of Demotic; Captain Edgerton, and Doctor Herbert, surgeon, of the Camel Corps; Achmed Effendi, an Arab, brought up in Lord Dudley's household in England and a good type of the Anglicized Oriental; Colonel Forester Pasha, K.C.B. (and more letters), Overlord of Upper Egypt, with droit de justice basse et haulte over

all the inhabitants thereof, and a number of other persons whom - including several ladies - it is needless to particularize.

The talk at dinner had been largely of the English occupation, and the Investigator was stronger on less complicated subjects. Accordingly, after suffering some prolongation of it during coffee, she turned with a little air of decision to her neighbor Achmed, and inquired cosily, she began with generalities, —

'Are you interested in the supernatural?'

'I might be if I knew anything about it,' he answered in the purest of British accents.

'Oh, don't you?' she lamented; 'I'm so disappointed. I thought that I should find spirits should find spirits - marids and ghins and ghouls here. Don't tell me that they have disappeared like the lotos and the chibouque!' The Investigator's violet eyes expressed sorrowful surprise.

'We have ghost-stories like yours, but none that have much local color, I fear,' Achmed replied, politely, but not encouragingly.

The Investigator was not easily baffled.

'I am sure you must know quantities of weird legends,' she said. 'Why, our sailors on the dahabeah have told us of a lot of adventures with ghins. They were a good deal alike, though, or else the dragoman who translated them edited them as well. They were always going home or returning to the boat

late at night, and the ghins appeared in the form of a camel or a buffalo; sometimes in that of a cat with fiery eyes like the one in the story of the Three Calenders, don't you remember?'

'I can't say that I do; awfully sorry though; it does n't make any difference, does it?' rejoined Achmed, trying to be courteous and wary at once. Discussing Egyptian beliefs and ideas with portionless American girls had long since palled on him.

'Of course it does. You ought to know The Arabian Nights by heart. I thought all Arabs learned it at school,' said the Investigator, reproachfully.

Achmed was not living up to her preconceived notion of what an Egyptian should be, and she was correspondingly severe with him.

Here Captain Egerton, whose mind moved leisurely, sauntered into the conversation.

'You were talkin' of ghouls,' he said slowly, and askin' if we'd ever seen one. I have. It was after Tosky in '89. You remember?' he added, addressing Cecil Carew.

The aide-de-camp looked uneasy. 'It's a long story- and hardly a dinner-table one,' he murmured to his next neighbor.

'A story, a real, true story about a ghoul! How delightful! We are all of us pining to hear it, are we not?' exclaimed the Investigator, fixing her shining eyes on the Captain's impassive face, quite unconscious that her suggestion was received with but chastened delight by the company.

"The Doctor knows it all as well as I do,' said the Captain, shifting the responsibility.

'The Doctor, obviously taciturn and hitherto silent, looked round the circle scrutinizingly, then, his glance resting on the Investigator, demurred.

"The moonlight is too fine to spoil with anything gruesome,' he said.

"The scene round us is the setting for an idyl.'

Even to people densely hedged in by purely personal interests the rare beauty of the night, and the spell of the strange landscape, had appealed for a fugitive moment. The young moon, her horns turned eastward, a slender Isis-bark of silver, floated in a cloudless sky; in the still, dry air the great constellations flamed with unwonted fire to Northern eyes. Alien stars, Canopus, out-burning in his turn all Cleopatra's lamps, swung low over their own shimmering images in the gently-flowing river. On the left bank, whence the air reached us sweetly burdened with envoys from the jasmines and mimosas of Luxor's gardens, the three pyramidal peaks of the Arabian chain rose dimlybright against a sombrely lucent sky. The faintly-outlined western shore seemed, transformed under the glamour of moonlight, to assume its true aspect, that of a mysterious and sacred realm, peopled by gods and the spirits of the blessed dead. And beneath the splendid calm of the ordered planets, and the tranquil caress of the quiet air, was always the pleasant sense of life and motion, in that smooth flood of moon-freighted water gliding silently below us.

The Investigator, in whom the pursuit of emotion via the garnering of facts had not dulled the capacity to feel emotion at first-hand, looked from river to sky, and from sky to mountains, with a quick, shuddering intake of the breath. Curiosity for the nonce was stilled, and she was content to enjoy mutely; but Captain Egerton, whose imagination was not his strong point, and whose scruples had apparently been transitory, persisted. If the Doctor was reluctant he would tell us the story himself.

'We-it was just after Tosky,' he began.

'What was Tosky?' queried the Investigator, as if with pencil poised for recording a new fact.

'It was ur- ur- Well, you see,' explained the Captain, 'in the summer of '89, Waad en Negumi, one of the Mahdi's ablest generals, invaded Egypt.'

'Was he not the general who defeated Hicks?' interjected the Professor, who, though a loyal British subject, was not a jingo.

"The same,' returned Captain Egerton meekly. 'He was an uncommonly clever man, and an awfully plucky beggar. Really, you know, to lead an army of five thousand soldiers, as many women, babies, and camp-followers

'And the wretched prisoners whom he drove before him out of their ruined villages,' added Achmed.

'With no commissariat, and only a few transport camels,' went on Carew, intrepidly, 'a hundred miles across a waterless desert to fight a battle, was rather a mad project; but Negumi's plan was to avoid Wady Halfa, where our troops were stationed, and to strike across the desert to a village called Buriban and give battle there. That was where he made a mistake. He expected to find an open country, and unarmed fellaheen. Instead he found half the garrison of Wady Halfa under Colonel Wodehouse marching between him and the river just ahead of his troops, destroying the date crops in the villages so the dervishes could not victual in them.'

'Practically starving them to death before fighting them, and incidentally starving the luckless, loyal villagers also,' exclaimed the Professor.

'Oh, did you really treat those poor peasants so?' questioned the Investigator anxiously.

'Why! Why! Those were my orders. God bless my soul! I'm the Queen's soldier

'Baid by the Wiceroy, howefer,' mumbled the Herr Doktor.

'And my first duty is obedience to my commanding officer,' explained Captain Egerton, goaded to fluency by a sense of injustice.

'We did feel awful brutes, though,' admitted the Honorable Cecil. 'Why, the first place where we ordered 'em to pull the green dates and burn 'em, the Sheik-el-Beled, who was an old man, came to Egerton's tent and offered him two hundred pounds to spare the crop. "My people will die of hunger," he groaned, looking like one of those Old Testament prophets, Jehu or

'Jeremiah,' murmured the Professor, surprised by this sudden incursion into his own realm.

'What did you do,' queried the Investigator.

"Told him orders must be obeyed, and promised a steamer-load of rations for the lot when the battle was over. But he did n't believe me. They never do believe us,' added the Captain, thoughtfully.

'Well, then,' he continued, 'he refused, saying Allah forbade him to starve his people, and I had to use the koorbag. The old man could n't have stood it, but he had a son of five-andthirty, and we laid on till the old man gave the order to cut down the dates. In the next village they had heard of our proceedin's, so we had no trouble, but in the next the sheik was childless and we had to burn the water-wheels before the beggars would give in. Now while half our flyin' column was cuttin' off Negumi's supplies, the other half, marchin' between him and the Nile, was keepin' him away from water; so his army soon began meltin' away, the women and children first, of course. Then they killed the transport animals for food, and naturally moved more slowly, and every day we potted half a dozen dervishes who ran onto our guns