ficer
and said calmly:

'We may as well go back. No trace here now; nothing to prove that man
was the one wounded by your soldiers' bullets! Probably they murdered
him to cover up the trace. See!' again he stooped and placed his hands
on the skeleton. 'The rats work quickly and they are many. These bones
are warm!'

I shuddered, and so did many more of those around me.

'Form!' said the officer, and so in marching order, with the lanterns
swinging in front and the manacled veterans in the midst, with steady
tramp we took ourselves out of the dustheaps and turned backward to
the fortress of Bicetre.

* * * * *

My year of probation has long since ended, and Alice is my wife. But
when I look back upon that trying twelvemonth one of the most vivid
incidents that memory recalls is that associated with my visit to the
City of Dust.

A Dream of Red Hands

The first opinion given to me regarding Jacob Settle was a simple
descriptive statement, 'He's a down-in-the-mouth chap': but I found
that it embodied the thoughts and ideas of all his fellow-workmen.
There was in the phrase a certain easy tolerance, an absence of
positive feeling of any kind, rather than any complete opinion, which
marked pretty accurately the man's place in public esteem. Still,
there was some dissimilarity between this and his appearance which
unconsciously set me thinking, and by degrees, as I saw more of the
place and the workmen, I came to have a special interest in him. He
was, I found, for ever doing kindnesses, not involving money expenses
beyond his humble means, but in the manifold ways of forethought and
forbearance and self-repression which are of the truer charities of
life. Women and children trusted him implicitly, though, strangely
enough, he rather shunned them, except when anyone was sick, and then
he made his appearance to help if he could, timidly and awkwardly. He
led a very solitary life, keeping house by himself in a tiny cottage,
or rather hut, of one room, far on the edge of the moorland. His
existence seemed so sad and solitary that I wished to cheer it up, and
for the purpose took the occasion when we had both been sitting up
with a child, injured by me through accident, to offer to lend him
books. He gladly accepted, and as we parted in the grey of the dawn I
felt that something of mutual confidence had been established between
us.

The books were always most carefully and punctu