s masks of impossible beasts roughly besmeared
in crude colours. There were gaily-coloured dominoes, blue, green, pink
and purple, harlequins combining all the colours of the rainbow in
one tight-fitting garment, and Columbines with short, tarlatan skirts,
beneath which peeped bare feet and ankles. There were judges' perruqes,
and soldiers' helmets of past generations, tall Normandy caps adorned
with hundreds of streaming ribbons, and powdered headgear which recalled
the glories of Versailles.

Everything was torn and dirty, the dominoes were in rags, the Pierrot
frills, mostly made up of paper, already hung in strips over the
wearers' shoulders. But what mattered that?

The crowd pushed and jolted, shouted and laughed, the girls screamed as
the men snatched a kiss here and there from willing or unwilling lips,
or stole an arm round a gaily accoutred waist. The spirit of Old King
Carnival was in the evening air--a spirit just awakened from a long Rip
van Winkle-like sleep.

In the centre of the Place stood the guillotine, grim and gaunt with
long, thin arms stretched out towards the sky, the last glimmer of
waning light striking the triangular knife, there, where it was not
rusty with stains of blood.

For weeks now Madame Guillotine had been much occupied plying her
gruesome trade; she now stood there in the gloom, passive and immovable,
seeming to wait placidly for the end of this holiday, ready to begin her
work again on the morrow. She towered above these merrymakers, hoisted
up on the platform whereon many an innocent foot had trodden, the
tattered basket beside her, into which many an innocent head had rolled.

What cared they to-night for Madame Guillotine and the horrors of
which she told? A crowd of Pierrots with floured faces and tattered
neck-frills had just swarmed up the wooden steps, shouting and laughing,
chasing each other round and round on the platform, until one of them
lost his footing and fell into the basket, covering himself with bran
and staining his clothes with blood.

"Ah! vogue la galere! We must be merry to-night!"

And all these people who for weeks past had been staring death and the
guillotine in the face, had denounced each other with savage callousness
in order to save themselves, or hidden for days in dark cellars to
escape apprehension, now laughed, and danced and shrieked with gladness
in a sudden, hysterical outburst of joy.

Close beside the guillotine stood the triumphal