undisciplined, the other gentle, frank, considerate; as the one was hideous, ill-formed and black as night, so the other was radiant with manly beauty and fair as the morning.  Each among his own people sprang from noble stock; the one a prince, the other the descendant of the purest Puritan race, which knew among its own divines and judges brave captains, and farther back a governor of the colony.  But the guard and his people were at the foot of the scale, the guarded at the top.  The blood flowing out upon the cypress bed was the best blood of America.  It was blue blood and brave blood.  Generation after generation it had flowed in the veins of fair women and noble men, and had never known dishonor.  Yet Fournier let it flow.  More, he was delighted that it continued to flow.

Presently, however, he sobered down, and began to prepare for his work.  He placed a large caldron of water over a fire; he brought basins, towels and his case of surgical instruments, and placed them in the, tent, and with them the case which he had taught the African to believe contained his god.  While thus busied he did not neglect the subject of his experiment.  His watchful eye noted everything—­the mass, of clots growing like a great crimson fungus under the wounded shoulder, the deadly pallor, the dark circles forming around the sunken eyes, the blanched lips, the transparent nostrils, the slow, deep respiration.  From time to time he felt the wounded man’s pulse and counted it carefully. Ninety—­he went out again into the open air; one hundred—­“The loss of blood tells,” he muttered, and began to rearrange his appliances and busy himself uneasily with them; one hundred and thirty beats to the minute —­“He is failing too fast:  I must stop this bleeding” said the experimenter.  Then he cleansed the wound, and tied the arteries, and bound it up.  But the loss of blood had been so great that the heart fluttered wildly and feebly in its efforts to contract upon its diminished contents, and Fournier, anxious, and pale himself almost as his victim, trembled when his finger felt in vain for the bleeding artery and caught only a faint tremulous thrill, so feeble that he scarcely knew whether the heart was beating at all or not.  In terror he threw the ends of the little tent and fanned him, and moistened his lips, and gave him brandy, and hastened to begin the experiment for which he had waited so long and for which both subjects were at last ready.

He told his savage that the Yankee was dying, but that he had communed with his god, who would let him live if blood was given in return.  Then he reminded him of the time when he lost blood, and that it had done him no harm.  The African, trained for this duty with so much care, did not fail him, but bared his arm and gave the blood.  The god was brought forth and caught it, and the sacrifice began.  As the silver, bowl floated in a basin of water so warm that the thermometer in its side marked ninety-eight