nge
freshness of vision. Nothing in ordinary human life seemed
common or mean to him, and this sense of wonder, combined with
a power of judgment much steadier than his father's, made him
a poet of considerable genius. "Undertones," published in
1863, and "Idylls and Legends of Inverburn," which appeared
two years later, made him famous. The same qualities which he
displayed in his poetry Buchanan exhibited in his earliest and
best novels. "The Shadow of the Sword," published in 1876, was
originally conceived as a poem, and it still remains one of
the best of modern English prose romances. In his latter years
Robert Buchanan, tortured by the long and painful illness of
his beautiful and gentle wife, wrote a considerable amount of
work with no literary merit; but this does not diminish the
value of his best and earliest work, which undoubtedly
entitles him to a place of importance in English literature.
He died on June 10, 1901.

_I.--The King of the Conscripts_

"Rohan Gwenfern!" cried the sergeant, in a voice that rang like a
trumpet through the length of the town hall.

No one answered. The crowd of young Kromlaix men looked at each other in
consternation. Was the handsomest, the strongest, and the most daring
lad in their village a coward? It was the dark year of 1813, when
Napoleon was draining France of all its manhood. Even the only sons of
poor widowed women, such as Rohan Gwenfern was, were no longer exempted
from conscription. Having lost half a million men amid the snows of
Russia, Napoleon had called for 200,000 more soldiers, and the little
Breton fishing village of Kromlaix had to provide twenty-five recruits.

"Rohan Gwenfern!" cried the sergeant again.

The mayor rose up behind the ballot-box on the large table, about which
the villagers were gathered, and looked around in vain for the splendid
figure of the young fisherman.

"Where is your nephew?" he said to Corporal Derval, in an angry voice.

Derval, one of Napoleon's veterans, who had been pensioned after losing
his leg at Austerlitz, looked at his pretty niece, Marcelle, with a
strange pallor on his furrowed, sunburnt face.

"Rohan was too ill to come," said Marcelle, with a troubled look in her
sweet grey eyes. "I will draw in his name."

"Very well, my pretty lass," said the mayor, his grim face softening
into a smile as he looked at the beautiful girl,