age. It was in the early summer, and
the foliage was green above him as the boughs swayed gently to and fro
in the morning breeze. The birds were singing gayly as they flitted
about over his head. The bees hummed along from flower to flower. At
last, so it seemed to him, he had come into a land of peace and quiet,
where there was rest and comfort and where no man need go in fear of
his life. It was a country where vengeance was not a duty and where
midnight combats were not a custom he found himself smiling as he
thought that a grisly dragon and a goblin rider would be equally out of
place in this laughing landscape.

Then the bell in the steeple of the little church began to ring
merrily, and he rose to his feet in expectation. All of a sudden the
knowledge came to him why it was that they were ringing. He wondered
then why the coming of the bride was thus delayed. He knew himself to
be a lover, with life opening brightly before him; and the world seemed
to him sweeter than ever before and more beautiful.

Then at last the girl whom he loved with his whole heart and who had
promised to marry him appeared in the distance, and he thought he had
never seen her look more lovely. As he beheld his bridal party
approaching, he slipped into the church to await her at the altar. The
sunshine fell full upon the portal and made a halo about the girl's
head as she crossed the threshold.

But even when the bride stood by his side and the clergyman had begun
the solemn service of the church the bells kept on, and soon their
chiming became a clangor, louder and sharper and more insistent.

VII

So clamorous and so persistent was the ringing that Cosmo Waynflete was
roused at last. He found himself suddenly standing on his feet, with
his hand clutching the back of the chair in which he had been sitting
before the fire when the rays of the setting sun had set long ago. The
room was dark, for it was lighted now only by the embers of the
burnt-out fire; and the electric bell was ringing steadily, as though
the man outside the door had resolved to waken the seven sleepers.

Then Cosmo Waynflete was wide-awake again; and he knew where he was
once more--not in Japan, not in Persia, not in Lisbon, not in Sleepy
Hollow, but here in New York, in his own room, before his own fire. He
opened the door at once and admitted his friend, Paul Stuyvesant.

"It isn't dinner-time, is it?" he asked. "I'm not late, am I? The fact
is, I've been a