ering. On the contrary, it seemed to have
some mysterious means of self-support, and the war office, in daily
communication with London, reported that it could withstand the
investment for an indefinite period. Meantime the Germans reintrenched
themselves, built forts of their own upon which they mounted the siege
guns intended for the walls, and constructed an impregnable line of
entanglements, redoubts, and defences, which rendered it impossible for
any army outside the city to come to its relief.

So rose the moon, turning white the millions of slate roofs, gilding the
traceries of the towers of Notre Dame, dimming the searchlights which,
like the antennae of gigantic fireflies, constantly played round the city
from the summit of the Eiffel Tower. So slept Paris, confident that no
crash of descending bombs would shatter the blue vault of the starlit
sky or rend the habitations in which lay two millions of human beings,
assured that the sun would rise through the gray mists of the Seine upon
the ancient beauties of the Tuilleries and the Louvre unmarred by the
enemy's projectiles, and that its citizens could pass freely along its
boulevards without menace of death from flying missiles. For no shell
could be hurled a distance of sixty miles, and an armistice had been
declared.

* * * * *

Behind a small hill within the German fortifications a group of officers
stood in the moonlight, examining what looked superficially like the
hangar of a small dirigible. Nestling behind the hill it cast a black
rectangular shadow upon the trampled sand of the redoubt. A score of
artisans were busy filling a deep trench through which a huge pipe led
off somewhere--a sort of deadly plumbing, for the house sheltered a
monster cannon reenforced by jackets of lead and steel, the whole
encased in a cooling apparatus of intricate manufacture. From the open
end of the house the cylindrical barrel of the gigantic engine of war
raised itself into the air at an angle of forty degrees, and from the
muzzle to the ground below it was a drop of over eighty feet. On a track
running off to the north rested the projectiles side by side, resembling
in the dim light a row of steam boilers in the yard of a locomotive
factory.

"Well," remarked one of the officers, turning to the only one of his
companions not in uniform. "'Thanatos' is ready."

The man addressed was Von Heckmann, the most famous inventor of military
o