he
never shall know. He believes his wife a second Penelope; he shall
keep that belief. There is a trench--you called it very properly a
grave. In that trench Knightley will not hear though all Tangier
scream its gossip in his ears. I mean to give him his chance of
death."

"No, Major," cried Scrope. "Or listen! Give me an equal chance."

"Trelawney's Regiment is not called out. Again, Lieutenant, I fear me
you will have the harder part of it."

Shackleton repeated Scrope's own words in all sincerity, and hurried
off to his post.

Scrope was left alone in the guard-room. A vision of the trench,
twelve feet deep, eight yards wide, yawned before his eyes. He closed
them, but that made no difference; he still saw the trench. In
imagination he began to measure its width and depth. Then he shook his
head to rid himself of the picture, and went out on to the balcony.
His eyes turned instinctively to a house by the city wall, to a corner
of the _patio_ the house and the latticed shutter of a window just
seen from the balcony.

He stepped back into the room with a feeling of nausea, and blowing
out the candles sat down alone, in the twilight, amongst the empty
chairs. There were dark corners in the room; the broadening light
searched into them, and suddenly the air was tinged with warm gold.
Somewhere the sun had risen. In a little, Scrope heard a dropping
sound of firing, and a few moments afterwards the rattle of a volley.
The battle was joined. Scrope saw the trench again yawn up before his
eyes. The Major was right. This morning, again, Lieutenant Scrope had
the harder part of it.

THE MAN OF WHEELS.

When Sir Charles Fosbrook was told by Mr. Pepys that Tangier had been
surrendered to the Moors, he asked at once after the fate of his
gigantic mole; and when he was informed that his mole had been, before
the evacuation, so utterly blown to pieces that its scattered blocks
made the harbour impossible for anchorage, he forbade so much as the
mention in his presence of the name of Africa. But if he had done with
Tangier, Tangier had not done with him, and five years afterwards
he became concerned in the most unexpected way with certain tragic
consequences of that desperate siege.

He received a letter from an acquaintance of whom he had long lost
sight, a Mr. Mardale of the Quarry House near Leamington, imploring
him to give his opinion upon some new inventions. The value of the
inventions could be easily g