Today's Stichomancy for Wassily Kandinsky

starting-place. I could not conceal my disappointment, and Mr. Smith was not less chagrined than I.

"A thousand devils!" cried he, "we know no better than before what is inside this confounded Great Eyrie, nor even if it is a crater."

"Volcano, or not," said I, "there are no suspicious noises now; neither smoke nor flame rises above it; nothing whatever threatens an eruption."

This was true. A profound silence reigned around us; and a perfectly clear sky shone overhead. We tasted the perfect calm of great altitudes.

It was worth noting that the circumference of the huge wall was about

there we should be indeed ungracious if we so far presumed upon your politeness as to interfere with the convenience of your friends. But, on second thoughts," he added, "I believe that this gentleman and I have met before. Mr. Hartley, I think. I regret to observe that you have had a fall."

And he offered his hand.

A sort of maiden dignity and a desire to delay as long as possible the necessity for explanation moved Harry to refuse this chance of help, and to deny his own identity. He chose the tender mercies of the gardener, who was at least unknown to him, rather than the curiosity and perhaps the doubts of an acquaintance.

a blow. This process was handed down from father to son, and in the course of time came to my father and so to me. None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from books. We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring bath.

And that is the way the farmer's son has learned hog scalding from the time when our ancient fathers got tired of eating bristles and decided to take their pork clean shaven. To-day there are books telling just how many degrees of heat make the water right for scalding hogs, and the metallurgists have written

ordinary man and woman prefer to take their crime romanticised, as it is administered to them in novel or play. The true stories told in this book represent the raw material from which works of art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some critics to Shakespeare. The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul Bourget's remarkable novel, "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime we owe Shelley's "Cenci" and Browning's "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Manning was the original of the maid Hortense in "Bleak House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright have all been made the heroes of books or

A Book of Remarkable Criminals