across her face. Was it the fugitive noon
sunshine? Or was it some glimmering perception of the old Greek
saying--'Character is Fate;' some sudden sense of the universal truth
that all are in bond to their own natures, and what a man has most
desired shall in the end enslave him?

THE END.

THE BURNING SPEAR

by John Galsworthy

Being the Experiences of Mr. John Lavender in the Time of War

Recorded by: A. R. P--M [John Galsworthy]

[NOTE: John Galsworthy said of this work: "'The Burning Spear' was
revenge of the nerves. It was bad enough to have to bear the dreads and
strains and griefs of war." Several years after its first publication he
admitted authorship and it was included in the collected edition of his
works. D.W.]

"With a heart of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air
In the wilderness I wander;
With a night of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end
For me it is no journey."

TOM O'BEDLAM

THE BURNING SPEAR

I

THE HERO

In the year ---- there dwelt on Hampstead Heath a small thin gentleman of
fifty-eight, gentle disposition, and independent means, whose wits had
become somewhat addled from reading the writings and speeches of public
men. The castle which, like every Englishman, he inhabited was embedded
in lilac bushes and laburnums, and was attached to another castle,
embedded, in deference to our national dislike of uniformity, in acacias
and laurustinus. Our gentleman, whose name was John Lavender, had until
the days of the Great War passed one of those curious existences are
sometimes to be met with, in doing harm to nobody. He had been brought
up to the Bar, but like most barristers had never practised, and had
spent his time among animals and the wisdom of the past. At the period
in which this record opens he owned a young female sheep-dog called
Blink, with beautiful eyes obscured by hair; and was attended to by a
thin and energetic housekeeper, in his estimation above all weakness,
whose name was Marian Petty, and by her husband, his chauffeur, whose
name was Joe.

It was the ambition of our hero to be, like all public men, without fear
and without reproach. He drank not, abstained from fleshly intercourse,
and habitually spoke the truth. His face was thin, high cheek-boned, and
not unpleasing, with on