he saddle to look back at a gallows which was visible on the
horizon against the beams of rising light. The subject may sound very
sensational, but it was not that aspect of it which charmed my sister;
she found beauty as well as romance in it, and after we returned to
camp in the evening she became so restless and engrossed by what she
had seen, that she got up during the night, and planned out the
headings of a story on the picture, adding--characteristically--a
moral or "soul" to the subject by a quotation[31] from Thomas a
Kempis--_Respice finem_. "In all things _remember the end_."

[Footnote 31: Letter, March 22, 1880.]

This "mapped-out" story, I am sorry to say, remains unfinished. The
manuscript went through many vicissitudes, was inadvertently torn up
and thrown into the waste-paper basket, whence it was rescued and the
pieces carefully enclosed in an envelope ready for mending. It was
afterwards lost again for many months in a box that was sent abroad,
but the fragments have been put together and copied, as they are
interesting from the promise that lies in the few words that remain.

A GENTLEMAN OF THE ROAD.

The old schoolmaster sat on a tombstone, an ancient altar-shaped
tomb which may have been reared when the yew tree above it was
planted. Children clustered round him like bees upon a branch, and
he held the book wide open so that, if possible, all might see into
it at once. It was not a school-book, it was a picture book, the
one out of which he told tales to the children on half-holidays.
The volume was old and the text was in Latin, a language of which
the schoolmaster had some little knowledge.

He could read the dial motto pat,--_Via crucis via lucis_. The Way
of the Cross is the Way of Light.

He understood the Latin headings to the Psalms and Canticles better
than the clerk, for he could adjust the words to their English
equivalents. The clerk took them as they stood, _Nunc dimittis_, or
the Song of Simeon. It was put down so in the rubric, he said, as
plain as "Here endeth the first lesson."

The schoolmaster made no such blunders. He could say the Lord's
Prayer in Latin, and part of the Creed, and from his seat in church
he could make out most of the virtues credited to the last account
of one Roger Beaufoy, who in this life had been entitled to write
Esquire after his name. The name k