way.

"'I want you--and you, Bekler,' he said, addressing a couple of the
elder men. His voice was calm, but his face was deadly white. 'The rest
of you, please go--get the women away as quickly as you can.'

"From that day old Nicholaus Geibel confined himself to the making of
mechanical rabbits and cats that mewed and washed their faces."

* * *

We agreed that the moral of MacShaugnassy's story was a good one.

(_To be continued._)

On Pilgrims and the Pilgrim Spirit

by

A. Adams Martin.

[Illustration:
"Then longe folk to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seeke strange strands
To ferne hallows couth in sundry lands."]

In the good old times, when a man wanted a little change from the bosom
of his family--in those days a somewhat restricted bosom--he went on a
crusade, or a pilgrimage.

What if he did spend his time and substance on that which, from a
worldly standpoint, profited not--absenting himself from home and
friends for periods of time lengthy enough to afford a modern wife good
grounds for a divorce--was it not all meritorious? Heaven, he fondly
believed, would more than pay his travelling expenses by a large cheque
to his credit on the next world, whilst he had the pleasure of the
journey in this: an ingenious method of seeing something of both! And so
he donned his pilgrim weeds, and his "cockle hat and shoon"--as all good
chroniclers tell us--and hied him off to Canterbury or Cologne, Rome,
Jerusalem, or Timbuctoo. Mrs. Pilgrim was left at home to play
"patience," and to keep the house and bairns. She was generally a
long-suffering creature, but sometimes she _did_ get into mischief. She
could not _always_ spin yarn, so she occasionally varied her task by
weaving nets--traps for the unwary who was _not_ a pilgrim.

But if she got into mischief, she paid the penalty; my lord invariably
cut off her head with his scimitar when he returned home--if she waited
for that--and there was an end of the matter. There was no Divorce Court
in the good old days, and a woman's head did not count for much. But
these slight casualties never diminished the ardour of the pilgrim
spirit: the pilgrim increased and multiplied, and sought new shrines as
well as new wives. To slightly vary the words of the poet, "_Shrine_
after _shrine_ his rising raptures fill. But still he sighs--for
_shrines_ are wanting still." The law of supply and demand, however,
worked as sur