r. "Monsieur the mayor!
Monsieur the mayor!" he called, while still far away.

"Cre cochon de malheur!" muttered the mayor, turning pale. "He's got
a telegram!"

The man came clattering across the square in his wooden shoes.

"A telegram," repeated the mayor, wiping the sudden sweat from his
forehead. "I never get telegrams. I don't want telegrams!"

He turned to me, almost bursting with suppressed prophecy.

"It has come--the evil that the black cruiser brings us! You laughed!
Tenez, monsieur; there's your bad luck in these blue morsels of
paper!"

And he snatched the telegram from the breathless messenger, reading it
with dilating eyes.

For a long while he sat there studying the telegram, his fat
forefinger following the scrawl, a crease deepening above his
eyebrows, and all the while his lips moved in noiseless repetition of
the words he spelled with difficulty and his labored breathing grew
louder.

When at length the magistrate had mastered the contents of his
telegram, he looked up with a stupid stare.

"I want my drummer. Where's the town-crier?" he demanded, as though
dazed.

"He has gone to Lorient, m'sieu the mayor," ventured the messenger.

"To get drunk. I remember. Imbecile! Why did he go to-day? Are there
not six other days in this cursed week? Who is there to drum? Nobody.
Nobody knows how in Paradise. Seigneur, Dieu! the ignorance of this
town!"

"M'sieu the mayor," ventured the messenger, "there's Jacqueline."

"Ho! Vrai. The Lizard's young one! She can drum, they say. She stole
my drum once. Why did she steal it but to drum upon it?"

"The little witch can drum them awake in Ker-Is," muttered the
messenger.

The mayor rose, looked around the square, frowned. Then he raised his
voice in a bellow: "Jacqueline! Jacqueline! _Thou_ Jacqueline!"

A far voice answered, faintly breaking across the square from the
bridge: "She is on the rocks with her sea-rake!"

The mayor thrust the blue telegram into his pocket and waddled out of
his garden, across the square, and up the path to the cliffs.

Uninvited, I went with him.

X

THE TOWN-CRIER

The bell in the unseen chapel ceased ringing as we came out on the
cliffs of Paradise, where, on the horizon, the sun hung low, belted
with a single ribbon of violet cloud.

Over acres of foaming shoals the crimson light flickered and spread,
painting the eastern cliffs with sombre fire. The ebb-tide, red as
blood, tumbled seaward acro