as next turned out--written in five
months--and was a great success. Publishers besieged the author for
another story, but he preferred poetry. It was thirty years before his
next novel, "Les Miserables," appeared. But all the time he wrote--plays,
verses, essays, pamphlets. Everything that he penned was widely read.
Amid storms of opposition and cries of bravo, continually making friends,
he moved steadily forward.

Men like Victor Hugo can be killed or they may be banished, but they can
not be bought; neither can they be intimidated into silence. He resigned
his pension and boldly expressed himself in his own way.

He knew history by heart and toyed with it; politics was his delight. But
it is a mistake to call him a statesman. He was bold to rashness,
impulsive, impatient and vehement. Because a man is great is no reason
why he should be proclaimed perfect. Such men as Victor Hugo need no
veneer--the truth will answer: he would explode a keg of powder to kill a
fly. He was an agitator. But these zealous souls are needed--not to
govern or to be blindly followed, but rather to make other men think for
themselves. Yet to do this in a monarchy is not safe.

The years passed, and the time came for either Hugo or Royalty to go;
France was not large enough for both. It proved to be Hugo; a bounty of
twenty-five thousand francs was offered for his body, dead or alive.
Through a woman's devotion he escaped to Brussels. He was driven from
there to Jersey, then to Guernsey.

It was nineteen years before he returned to Paris--years of banishment,
but years of glory. Exiled by Fate that he might do his work!

* * * * *

Each day a steamer starts from Southampton for Guernsey,
Alderney and Jersey. These are names known to countless farmers' boys the
wide world over.

You can not mistake the Channel Island boats--they smell like a county
fair, and though you be blind and deaf it is impossible to board the
wrong craft. Every time one of these staunch little steamers lands in
England, crates containing mild-eyed, lusty calves are slid down the
gangplank, marked for Maine, Iowa, California, or some uttermost part of
the earth. There his vealship (worth his weight in gold) is going to
found a kingdom.

I stood on the dock watching the bovine passengers disembark, and
furtively listened the while to an animated argument between two rather
rough-looking, red-faced men, clothed in corduroys and carr