“Oh!” Mr. Williams was slightly shocked.  “I’d have thought they’d be singing of their feast.”

“It is of their feast they sing.”

It has been stated that Mr. Williams was not imaginative.  But a few years of life in climates alien and intemperate had disordered his nerves.  There was that in the rhythms of the hymn which made bristle his flesh.

Suddenly, when they were very near, the voices ceased, leaving a legacy of silence more sinister than themselves.  And now the black spaces between the trees were relieved by bits of white that were the eyeballs and teeth of Mahamo’s brethren.

“It was of their feast, it was of you, they sang,” said Mahamo.

“Look here,” cried Mr. Williams in his voice of a man not to be trifled with.  “Look here, if you’ve—­”

He was silenced by sight of what seemed to be a young sapling sprung up from the ground within a yard of him—­a young sapling tremulous, with a root of steel.  Then a thread-like shadow skimmed the air, and another spear came impinging the ground within an inch of his feet.

As he turned in his flight he saw the goods so neatly arranged at his orders, and there flashed through him, even in the thick of the spears, the thought that he would be a grave loss to his employers.  This—­for Mr. Williams was, not less than the goods, of a kind easily replaced—­was an illusion.  It was the last of Mr. Williams illusions.

A RECOLLECTION

By

EDM*ND G*SSE

“And let us strew
Twain wreaths of holly and of yew.”

WALLER.

One out of many Christmas Days abides with peculiar vividness in my memory.  In setting down, however clumsily, some slight record of it, I feel that I shall be discharging a duty not only to the two disparately illustrious men who made it so very memorable, but also to all young students of English and Scandinavian literature.  My use of the first person singular, delightful though that pronoun is in the works of the truly gifted, jars unspeakably on me; but reasons of space baulk my sober desire to call myself merely the present writer, or the infatuated go-between, or the cowed and imponderable young person who was in attendance.

In the third week of December, 1878, taking the opportunity of a brief and undeserved vacation, I went to Venice.  On the morning after my arrival, in answer to a most kind and cordial summons, I presented myself at the Palazzo Rezzonico.  Intense as was the impression he always made even in London, I think that those of us who met Robert Browning only in the stress and roar of that metropolis can hardly have gauged the fullness of his potentialities for impressing.  Venice, “so weak, so quiet,” as Mr. Ruskin had called her, was indeed the ideal setting for one to whom neither of those epithets could by any possibility