OUT OF THE WIND AND THE TWILIGHT.

It was just before sunset. The sky was gorgeously crimson as Grandfather and I drove into the little town. Down the street, slightly widening from the road, flamed the lights of departing day. Gaunt trees-they must have been elms-towered above us and their long shadows seemed interminable. The houses were few and unlike any others I have ever seen. They were huge, clap-boarded, with little square windows and log-framed doors. All was sombre and desolate in the sunset light, as it blazed through the rows of sentinel elms.

Almost immediately one of the vesper storms which often seem born with the death of day, lashed through the tops of the trees. Its force was cyclonic and whirled the dust in strange arabesques across the road and out into the fast-gathering twilight.

And she came from the dust-cloud which hid the sunset from us. Her hair was unbound and the wind shook it about her like a veil, so it concealed her eyes. Her clothing seemed gray, but it may have been the dust, and although the storm swept her cloak around her in a mist, and raged till the trees leaped with frenzy, she walked easily and gracefully toward us.

Again the storm redoubled in fury. She was close to me and I could see her lips move: her eyes were still concealed. Then she stretched out her arms to me, and though I wished to go, I could not. And without having made me understand a word, she was gone-and the storm was gone and the little town with its avenue of trees was gone, and before us was the dusty country road and dull afterglow. Behind us I felt the shadows of night.

Edward Eyre Hunt.

THE SONG OF THE REVOLUTIONIST.

I comfort the waves with the song of my gladness:
O gather, ye mighty ones, leap like wild horses.

I send out my voice on the face of the waters,
The voices are kissing, my voice and the ocean.
The horses are neighing, and trampling the stables;
To be free, to be free! is the cry of their roaring;
Their nostrils distended, their necks clothed with terrors:
O come, thou great driver! they call to me prancing.
Ha! ha! for the shoutings and noise of the trumpets,
Oh, lead and we follow, we follow for Freedom!

The skies are arraying like cohorts for battle,
The storm-clouds assemble with shattering tumult,
The thunders and lightnings a-tremble for conflict.
They shock with the sound of a breaking of heavens,
The deep and the firmament lock and they wrestle;
With blindness and madness the armies upgather,
They swirl and they eddy, they rage in their fury,
The giants are prostrate, the armies in death-grip,
And pall of deep grayness o'ercovers their striving.

Like a graybeard I rise, and I look to the heavens: My eyes they are blurred with the tears of the horses, The horses are dead, and the gray murky heaven; The armies are dead, and not one left of battle.

A gleam in the East, and the world is new born,
My horses are living! the skies are new born,

My eyes feel the warmth, and clear of their darkness,
My brain is renewed with the song of new gladness.
I comfort the waves with the song of my comfort,
The heavens I call to with voice of consoling:

O Death, thou art conquered, no more do I fear thee!
O life, thou art gracious, O sun, thou art beaming!
Sing loud, ye wide heavens, O prance, princely horses,
For birth is in death, and a sun in the darkness,
And the blood of our life filled with pulses, and beating,
Lives ever and ever. Ho! ho! my white horses!

Allan Davis.

THE TRAVEL PAPERS OF ARMINIUS.

V. CONCERNING WANDERINGS WITH A TEA-BASKET THROUGH SICILY.

Kennst du das Land wo die Citronen blühn,
Im dunklen Laub die Goldorangen glühn,
Ein sanfter Wind vom blauen Himmel weht,
Die Myrte still und hoch der Lorbeer steht,
Kennst du es wohl? Dahin! Dahin!

Möcht ich mit dir, O mein Geliebter, ziehn !

On the outskirts of Palermo to the west, there where the "lower middle class" has its dwelling-places, and the good people, untroubled by the pompous, high-nosed fashion of the villa districts, sit and trundle their bambini on the sidewalk, there where the fields begin and the street-cars swish round their poles for the return journey to the populous Via Cavour and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele,-it is there that you find the road to Monte Pellegrino. For a hundred yards it is level as a table. Then, rising suddenly in sharp zig-zag, it takes you up the stony mountain-side until you are a thousand feet over the sea. Still it stretches on before you, in long curves rising languidly, until it brings you to the grotto where the good Lady Rosalia won her aureole. There it leaves you to shift for yourself, and you struggle as best you may through tall grasses and shifting rocks up the steep path to the summit. When you have reached it, you have Sicily at your feet.

There is a magic about Sicily. It has been the battle-ground for so many great nations, the cradle, the nursery and the grave for so many great peoples, until the air seems to carry the dim forms, the wind the low voices of the many who have played out their days there, each race terrifying in its approach, conquering and being conquered in its turn. In Sicily, every great nation of European history has had its fling. The Sikilians, Phoenicians and Greeks, the Romans, the

Saracens, the Normans, the Spaniards, the House of Anjou, of Bourbon, of Aragon, of Bonaparte, of Savoy-all have found pleasure and deeper distress with their beautiful and rebellious slave. One ruin rises above another. Sicily is a handbook of the world's architectures, as it is a panorama of the world's civilizations. It is a country with a chequered past, a perilous present, a dubious future. And withal it is the most beautiful country that God ever made.

From the summit of Monte Pellegrino you look down on the city of Palermo that lies in the blue afternoon haze, silent in its deep broad plain. To east and south the hills rise as a wall about it, to the north the sea; to the west, the plain, narrowing, slips in between the southern hills and the great mole-shaped crag on which you stand, forming the Golden Horn of Plenty, the Conca d'Oro, whose winding shell is golden with wildflowers, and whose mouth is the great city. Etna is in cloud, the hills roundabout are hazy, but still you can distinguish the villages here and there, the great Cathedral of Monreale on the slope southward from Palermo, and the quiet churchyard of Santa Maria di Jesu to the east. Far away beyond are shadowy islands with their own sullen volcano. The craggy shores end in mist. Vaguely you point out to yourself the places beyond the mountains where Messina and Syracuse, Girgenti and Segesta must be.

We were four of us together in Sicily, four of us with a trusted tea-basket that we guarded as the nymphs once guarded the golden fruit of the Hesperides, and loved as the very apple of our eye. We were a jovial quartette, thrown together partly by chance, partly by deep-laid plan. He whom time had clothed with the mantle of authority we dubbed Jupiter; Daphne and Arethusa were our nymphs. I myself might have been termed Mercury, "god of commerce and protector of thieves," for I was the courier. But I was an honest courier, and bargained for the good of the Four till my soul was ashamed. So they spared me.

The tea-basket! Let no one consider the tea-basket with contempt. Each country must be seen in its own way, it must be attacked