close to him his lyre, but raised on high his staff of oak.  Then from behind one struck him with a keen knife, and he sank, and lay in his blood.  The place was the edge of a glade, where the trees thinned away and the sky might be seen overhead.  And now, across the blue heaven, came a second line of the south-ward-going cranes.  They flew low, they flapped their wings, and the wood heard their crying.  Then Ibycus the poet raised his arms to his brothers the birds.  ’Ye cranes, flying between earth and heaven, avenge shed blood, as is right!’

“Hoarse screamed the cranes flying overhead.  Ibycus the poet closed his eyes, pressed his lips to Mother Earth, and died.  The cranes screamed again, circling the wood, then in a long line sailed southward through the blue air until they might neither be heard nor seen.  The robbers stared after them.  They laughed, but without mirth.  Then, stooping to the body of Ibycus, they would have rifled it when, hearing a sudden sound of men’s voices entering the wood, they took violent fright and fled.”

Strickland looked still at the reader.  Alexander had straightened himself.  He was speaking rather than reading.  His voice had intensities and shadows.  His brows had drawn together, his eyes glowed, and he stood with nostrils somewhat distended.  The emotion that he plainly showed seemed to gather about the injury done and the appeal of Ibycus.  The earlier Ibycus had not seemed greatly to interest him.  Strickland was used to stormy youth, to its passional moments, sudden glows, burnings, sympathies, defiances, lurid shows of effects with the causes largely unapparent.  It was his trade to know youth, and he had a psychologist’s interest.  He said now to himself, “There is something in his character that connects itself with, that responds to, the idea of vengeance.”  There came into his memory the laird’s talk, the evening of Mr. Touris’s visit, in June.  Glenfernie, who would have wrestled with Grierson of Lagg at the edge of the pit; Glenfernie’s mother and father, who might have had much the same feeling; their forebears beyond them with like sensations toward the Griersons of their day....  The long line of them—­the long line of mankind—­injured and injurers....

“Travelers through the wood, whose voices the robbers heard, found Ibycus the poet lying upon the ground, ravished of life.  It chanced that he had been known of them, known and loved.  Great mourning arose, and vain search for them who had done this wrong.  But those strong, wicked ones were gone, fled from their haunts, fled from the wood afar to Corinth, for the god Pan had thrown against them a pine cone.  So the travelers took the body of Ibycus and bore it with them to Corinth.

“A poet had been slain upon the threshold of the house of song.  Sacred blood had spattered the white robes of a queen dressed for jubilee.  Evil unreturned to its doers must darken the sunshine of the famous days.  Corinth