ly, that his blood would assuredly give birth to
other martyrs. They might send him to the scaffold, said he, but he knew
that his example would bear fruit. After him would come another avenger,
and yet another, and others still, until the old and rotten social system
should have crumbled away so as to make room for the society of justice
and happiness of which he was one of the apostles.

The presiding judge, in his impatience and agitation, twice endeavoured
to interrupt Salvat. But the other read on and on with the imperturbable
conscientiousness of one who fears that he may not give proper utterance
to his most important words. He must have been thinking of that perusal
ever since he had been in prison. It was the decisive act of his suicide,
the act by which he proclaimed that he gave his life for the glory of
dying in the cause of mankind. And when he had finished he sat down
between the gendarmes with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks, as if he
inwardly experienced some deep joy.

To destroy the effect which the declaration had produced--a commingling
of fear and compassion--the judge at once wished to proceed with the
hearing of the witnesses. Of these there was an interminable procession;
though little interest attached to their evidence, for none of them had
any revelations to make. Most attention perhaps was paid to the measured
statements of Grandidier, who had been obliged to dismiss Salvat from his
employ on account of the Anarchist propaganda he had carried on. Then the
prisoner's brother-in-law, Toussaint, the mechanician, also seemed a very
worthy fellow if one might judge him by the manner in which he strove to
put things favourably for Salvat, without in any way departing from the
truth. After Toussaint's evidence considerable time was taken up by the
discussions between the experts, who disagreed in public as much as they
had disagreed in their reports. Although they were all of opinion that
dynamite could not have been the explosive employed in the bomb, they
indulged in the most extraordinary and contradictory suppositions as to
this explosive's real nature. Eventually a written opinion given by the
illustrious _savant_ Bertheroy was read; and this, after clearly setting
forth the known facts, concluded that one found oneself in presence of a
new explosive of prodigious power, the formula of which he himself was
unable to specify.

Then detective Mondesir and commissary Dupot came in turn to relate