Part 3

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the entreaties of the wretch on the floor. At last Barbaroux spoke. "She has said rightly," he pronounced. "He shall live. They have put us out of the law and set a price on our heads; but we will keep the law. He shall live. But, hark you," the great orator continued, in tones which Michel never forgot, "if a whisper escape you as to our presence here, or our names, or if you wrong your wife by word or deed, the life she has saved shall pay for it.

"Remember!" he added, shaking Michel to and fro with a finger, "the arm of Barbaroux is long, and though I be a hundred leagues away, I shall know and I shall punish. So, beware! Now rise, and live!"

The miserable man cowered back to the wall, frightened to the core of his heart. The Girondins conferred a while in whispers, two of their number assisting Pierre to cross the barrier. Suddenly there came--and Michel trembled anew as he heard it--a loud knocking at the door. All started and stood listening and waiting. A voice outside cried: "Open! open! in the name of the law!"

"We have lingered too long," Barbaroux muttered. "I should have thought of this. It is the Mayor of Carbaix come to apprehend our friend."

Again the Girondins conferred together. At last, seeming to arrive at a conclusion, they ranged themselves on either side of the door, and one of their number opened it. A short, stout man, girt with a tricolor sash, and wearing a huge sword, entered with an air of authority--being blinded by the light he saw nothing out of the common--and was followed by four men armed with muskets.

Their appearance produced an extraordinary effect on Michel Tellier. As they one by one crossed the threshold, the peasant leaned forward, his face flushed, his eyes gleaming, and counted them. They were only five. And the others were twelve. He fell back, and from that moment his belief in the Girondins' power was clinched.

"In the name of the law!" panted the mayor. "Why did you not--" Then he stopped abruptly, his mouth remaining open. He found himself surrounded by a group of grim, silent mutes, with arms in their hands, and in a twinkling it flashed into his mind that these were the eleven chiefs of the Girondins, whom he had been warned to keep watch for. He had come to catch a pigeon and had caught a crow. He turned pale and his eyes dropped. "Who are--who are these gentlemen?" he stammered, in a ludicrously altered tone.

"Some volunteers of Quumpen, returning home," replied Barbaroux, with ironical smoothness.

"You have your papers, citizens?" the mayor asked, mechanically; and he took a step back towards the door, and looked over his shoulder.

"Here they are!" said Petion rudely, thrusting a packet into his hands. "They are in order."

The mayor took them, and longing only to see the outside of the door, pretended to look through them, his little heart going pit-a-pat within him. "They seem to be in order," he assented, feebly. "I need not trouble you further, citizens. I came here under a misapprehension, I find, and I wish you a good journey."

He knew, as he backed out, that he was cutting a poor figure. He would fain have made a more dignified retreat. But before these men, fugitives and outlaws as they were, he felt, though he was Mayor of Carbaix, almost as small a man as did Michel Tellier. These were the men of the Revolution. They had bearded nobles and pulled down kings. There was Barbaroux, who had grappled with Marat; and Petion, the Mayor of the Bastille. The little Mayor of Carbaix knew greatness when he saw it. He turned tail, and hurried back to his fireside, his body-guard not a whit behind him.

Five minutes later the men he feared and envied came out also, and went their way, passing in single file into the darkness which brooded over the great monolith; beginning, brave hearts, another of the few stages which still lay between them and the guillotine. Then in the cottage there remained only Michel and Jeanne. She sat by the dying embers, silent, and lost in thought. He leaned against the wall, his eyes roving ceaselessly, but always when his gaze met hers it fell. Barbaroux had conquered him. It was not until Jeanne had risen to close the door, and he was alone, that he wrung his hands, and muttered: "Five crowns! Five crowns gone and wasted!"

"HUMAN DOCUMENTS."

Facing this pastel, in an opposite corner of the room, another little thing full of sadness catches my eye, despite the deepening twilight. It is a yellow-stained photograph hung on the wall in a simple, wooden frame. It is the young Prince Imperial, who was killed in Africa a dozen years ago, but is shown here as a mere child in knee breeches. An odd, but touching, fancy it was of the Empress Eugenie to place this souvenir of her son, the last of the Napoleons, in the very room where that other one was born, the giant who shook the earth....

How strange and startling it will be a century or two hence for our descendants to turn over the photographs of their ancestors!... The portraits left by our forefathers, expressive though they may be, whether painted or engraved, can never produce in us an impression equally vivid; but photographs are the very reflections of living beings, fixing their precise attitudes, their gestures, their most fleeting expressions. What a curious thing it will be, what an awe-inspiring thing for future generations to study our faces when we shall have fallen into the dead past!...--A fragment from Loti's "Book of Pity and of Death."

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES.

EDWARD EVERETT HALE, clergyman and author, born in Boston in 1822, was graduated at Harvard in 1839. While a clergyman, he is perhaps best known to the world as a philanthropist and an author. He has written short stories, novels, juvenile books, works of travel, essays, biography, and history, besides giving much time to his pastoral duties, to preaching, lecturing, and the organization of charities. He founded the magazine "Old and New," afterward merged in "Scribner's" (now "The Century"). Two of his short stories, "My Double, and How He Undid Me," and "The Man Without a Country," are classics.

HENRI ADOLPHE STEPHAN OPPER, known to the world as M. DE BLOWITZ, born at Blowitz, Bohemia, on December 28, 1825, migrated to France in 1848, and became engaged as professor of the German language and literature at the Lycee of Tours. Here he remained till 1860, when he left to fill, successively, similar posts at Limoges, Poictiers, and Marseilles. He married the daughter of a paymaster of the French Marine. It was not till 1871 that he became a naturalized Frenchman, and, after the French defeat by the Germans, he was a confidant and emissary of both Gambetta and Thiers. His entrance into journalism was as the collaborateur of Lawrence Oliphant, the special correspondent of the "London Times" at Versailles. On Oliphant's retirement, M. de Blowitz was promoted by the editor of the "Times," to fill his place. The subsequent career of the great correspondent has been identified with some of the most striking episodes in modern politics and journalism.

DANIEL VIERGE URRABIETA, born in Madrid, 1852, became a student of the Fine Arts Academy of Madrid in 1865. In 1869 he went to Paris and began his career of illustrator. In 1881 he was stricken by an attack of paralysis, which it was feared would be fatal. But for the last four or five years he has been growing steadily better in health, and has been able to resume his brilliant work. Although but little known to the public at large, he ranks among the most original and striking of modern artists, and is without doubt at the head of the illustrators.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON, born at Alva, Ohio, February 11, 1847, had no schooling except the attrition of life. At the age of fifteen, having been taught telegraphy, he graduated from the life of a train newsboy into that of an operator, and, during several years of wandering, acquired extraordinary skill. The study of theory ran _aequo pede_ with executive work. He quickly invented the automatic repeater to transfer messages from one to another wire. It is needless to touch upon his further achievements which have made his name famous in the whole civilized world.

EDWARD EVERETT HALE.

M. DE BLOWITZ.

DANIEL VIERGE URRABIETA.

THOMAS ALVA EDISON.

WILD BEASTS.

HOW THEY ARE TRANSPORTED AND TRAINED.

BY RAYMOND BLATHWAYT.

Few of those people who go to a menagerie realize what an immense undertaking it is to transport wild beasts from the land of their birth and of their freedom to the land of their imprisonment, and, too frequently, of their death. I will ask my readers to picture for themselves an African desert blazing beneath a burning sun. Across the weary waste of sand a long column of men and animals is wending its slow way. As it draws nearer we see that it is a caravan of wild animals on their way from the interior to the seaboard. And as it passes us, the vast mass of living creatures, as in a chemical process, slowly dissolves itself into distinct particles and individualities. Let us regard them carefully. In the first place we notice a procession of fourteen stately giraffes, then come five elephants, a huge rhinoceros, four wild buffaloes bellowing sadly after the mates they have forever left behind. Then there go lumbering by a number of enormous carts or wagons, in which are safely confined thirty hyenas, five leopards, six lions, two chetahs, sixteen antelopes, two lynxes, one serval, one wardbob, twenty smaller carnivorous animals, four African ant-eaters, and forty-five monkeys. And then there come slowly prancing by, wary, restless, cunning, twenty-six ostriches. There are twenty boxes of birds, from which sounds of shrill screaming are constantly proceeding. There are upwards of a hundred Abyssinian goats scattered here and there in the procession. These are to give milk for the young animals, and to serve as food and meat for the old. The caravan is on its way through the desert to Suakim, which is the first shipping place for Europe. There are no less than a hundred and twenty camels in it, which are required to carry the food for this caravan, and there are upwards of a hundred and sixty drivers in the procession. It takes the caravans upwards of thirty-six days to cover the distance which lies between Cassala in the interior of Nubia and the port of Suakim, for which they are bound. The same journey is usually performed by quick post camels in twelve days.

This is the exact account of a caravan which Karl Hagenbeck told me he brought across the desert in the year 1870. "It is tremendously anxious work," said he, "the transportation of these animals across sea and land. The amount of water which we have to carry with us in goats' hides upon camels' backs is prodigious, for nothing would be more awful than to run short of water in the middle of the desert, and to be surrounded by a number of wild beasts, maddened with heat and unquenchable thirst. The principal food for the young elephants and rhinoceroses on the way home is a fruit called nabeck, that is, a kind of cherry of which they are very fond. Giraffes and antelopes and ostriches are provided with the doura corn that grows in the interior. All these bigger animals walk, and as they jog along my people feed them occasionally with hard ship biscuit, which appears to sustain them well through the journey. At four o'clock every morning the caravan strikes its tents and begins its march. They go plodding along till ten o'clock, when the day becomes too hot for further progress."

"But do the animals never attempt to escape?" said I.

"Well, not often," replied Karl Hagenbeck; "but," he added, with a hearty laugh of recollection, "I remember that once, in that very year 1870, of which I have just been telling you, the whole of the ostriches, twenty-six in number, ran away just as we were getting them into the railway station at Suakim. Away they went, heading straight for the desert. I never was in such a dreadful fix in my life. At last it struck me that it would be a good plan to drive all the goats and camels towards them; we did so, and, when the ostriches saw them advancing, they formed themselves into a flock, and we drove the whole lot into the station. The birds were caught one by one and put into the cars. That was the last transport, by-the-by, that poor Casanova ever brought over. Indeed, he died at Alexandria in the very midst of the whole business, and we buried him on the evening of his death. It was a dreadful time, and everything appeared to be against us, for at the very moment of his death, just as we were getting the animals on board ship, a fearful earthquake shook the whole land. I thought there was something about to happen, for the animals were very uneasy, the birds were twittering, the monkeys were chattering and trembling, the lions were roaring constantly, the elephants were deafening with their long trumpetings. Suddenly I felt the steamer quivering from stem to stern. The sea was tossing, the sun was hidden behind a thick yellow mist. I looked toward the land where the minarets were toppling down, and where the greatest horror and confusion appeared to prevail, and all the while poor Casanova lay dead or dying below. I shall never forget that awful morning.

"We had had the greatest possible difficulty just before, too, for at Suakim the railway people had told us that we had too many wagons, and that they would not transport us any farther. However, I soon settled that by going up to the directors of the railway and demanding from them an express train immediately; 'for,' said I, 'these animals are for the Emperor of Austria,' and to prove this I showed them a great document sealed by the emperor himself."

ADVENTURES WITH ESCAPED ANIMALS.

"On another occasion I was journeying through Suez with a giraffe which for five months had been living in the German Consul's garden. I was leading it to the station when it suddenly took fright and ran away. For four long, weary miles I hung on to the wretched beast, but at last I was obliged to drop the rope and let it go. A smart little Nubian boy then took up the chase; he got hold of the rope and eventually tied it round a tree, and after a while we led the animal quietly back to the station.

"But one of the most alarming adventures that ever overtook me whilst I was transporting animals was that which occurred once when twelve elephants broke away from me and rushed through the streets of Vienna. The whole twelve had been deposited in a _depot_, where they had to rest for two days. I was taking six of the elephants to lead them to the station, and when my back was turned and I was engaged with these six elephants, the other six stealthily and quietly pulled up the iron rings by which they were fastened to the ground, trumpeted loudly, and, before I knew what had happened, the twelve animals were rushing through the streets of Vienna. At last, after a long chase, I caught the biggest elephant, and led it to the station, the others following quietly enough. But my troubles were not over yet, for I hardly got the first four into a railway van when the others began to howl. The four elephants in the train plunged and kicked about, and at last they broke their ropes and ran out of the van, followed by all the others, and into the open streets. Then began another hunt up the big fashionable streets, down little courts and alleys, once after one which ran into a big shop, all over a big park, and this went on for three hours, until, at last, greatly to my relief, I got them safely into the station and packed into the vans for their journey."

WILD ANIMALS ABOARD SHIP.

"Perhaps the most difficult part of transportation, notwithstanding all the adventures I have had on land, is the getting the big animals on board ship. Take elephants for instance. They are placed in barges and then they are slung up in big slings on to the steamer. This is very difficult and very anxious work, for very often they are killed by the breaking of their necks or their legs. And then again, once they are on board ship, it is very difficult to bring elephants alive to Europe. They suffer dreadfully from sea-sickness, and cannot eat. Some of them are put between decks, and some of them have stables fitted up for them on deck.

"I remember once that Casanova left Africa with a cargo of forty elephants, thirteen only of which reached Trieste alive, and only twelve came here to me in Hamburg. On one occasion, in 1881 I think it was, I was bringing over a large cargo of forty-two ostriches from the Somali country. We were going through the Red Sea, when suddenly a violent storm broke upon us. It was pitch dark on deck, but I went below to look at my birds, and by the dim light of the lantern, and the flash of lightning that every now and again lit up the whole of the ship, I saw that the poor creatures were swaying to and fro, and that they were in the greatest possible discomfort. That night more than thirty of them broke their legs, and the next day we had to throw their bodies into the sea, and out of the forty-two I brought only nine home to Europe. But perhaps one of the most dangerous adventures that I ever had in transporting wild beasts was in 1871. I was taking a rhinoceros from the East India Docks to the Zoological Gardens in London. To do this I had to take it and lead it through the docks on a flat trolly. At last we got the beast hoisted on a wagon, and fastened by all four legs. Suddenly an engine drove by. The animal became hideously frightened, his eyes rolled white, then red. He then planted his horn under the seat upon which the man who was driving the wagon was seated. Away went the man, away went the seat, clean over the three horses. They in their turn became dreadfully frightened, too, and bolted. I hit the beast as hard as ever I could with a rope. We managed to tie another rope round his neck and fastened it down, and at last we got him safely down the Commercial Road, and then settled in some stables. I had a big box made for him, and at last conveyed him safely to his destination; but I wouldn't go through that experience again for a million of money.

"I was once bringing home a full-grown alligator," continued Mr. Hagenbeck, smiling at the thought of the adventure of which he was about to tell me, "and I was travelling on a passenger ship. One morning a most amusing incident occurred, but one which all the same might have been attended with serious consequences. I had paid my usual morning visit to my travelling companion, and had seen to his supply of food and water, and having assured myself that he was quite comfortable and well looked after, I retired to my cabin to lie down, the day being very hot. Suddenly I heard a great tramping overhead and the screaming of women and children. I could not think what was the matter, so I ran up on deck; as I went I passed a number of people rushing down the companion way. The male passengers were on the captain's deck; the sailors were climbing the rigging as fast as they could. The deck was perfectly clear. In the midst of the empty deck stood my alligator, the innocent cause of this sudden commotion, with gently smiling jaws, looking wonderingly on. After a good long time and much difficulty I got the beast into his own habitation."

TRAINING OF WILD BEASTS.

It is told of the mad King of Bavaria, that he used frequently to command great theatrical entertainments at which he himself was the only spectator. A similar experience befell myself when I was visiting Hamburg. For Mr. Karl Hagenbeck, at my special request, and with great good nature, gave two full performances in my honor, at which, like the mad Bavarian monarch, I was the only spectator. In the first performance only very young animals took part, but as they had been working since last January year, they were pretty well up to all the little tricks they had been taught. My readers will imagine a great circle carefully railed off from the outside world by iron bars. Round this circle, upon a number of little stands, sat the performing animals, waiting to take their respective "turns," as they say in the music halls; in the midst of the circle sat myself, with a beautiful little baby lion on my knee, which amused itself by playing with my watch chain and handkerchief. Two little tigers which got tired of sitting still suddenly jumped down from their perches and ran up to play with me and the baby lion. A young lion on another perch yawned so loud that we all, animals and men, looked up to see what was the matter. Mr. Hagenbeck walked round the circle, stroking the animals, most of which affectionately kissed him as he passed.

YOUNG ANIMALS AT SCHOOL.

At this moment Mr. Mellermann, who is one of the finest wild beast trainers in the world, entered the circle with his whip in his hand, which, as he entered, he cracked smartly, causing the animals to spring sharply to attention upon their little seats. Karl Hagenbeck introduced me to Mr. Mellermann, who is indeed his own brother-in-law as well as being his trainer.

"What is your rule of training, Mr. Mellermann?" said I.

"Kindness and coolness and firmness," he replied, "as you will see in this performance. Come on, pussies," he continued, "show this gentleman how you can run round the circle."

The pussies, as he called them, fairly big tigers as I should have considered them, unwillingly crept off their seats, growling not a little. Mr. Mellermann cracked his whip smartly, but did not hit them. The animals then began to run very prettily round and round the circle. So well did they do their little tricks that Mr. Mellermann said: "Now you shall have some sugar, you have been very good." He placed in my hand a few lumps of sugar which I myself gave to them, greatly to their pleasure. Then a pyramid was formed by some young tigers, some lions, a couple of ponies, and four young goats. The pyramid itself consisted of a small double ladder upon the steps of which the animals somewhat nervously took their places, and upon which they stood gazing quietly down upon us, until they were told that they might go back to their places. After a while, when school was over, the goats and ponies left the arena, and then the door of a big cage, which gave upon the circle, was thrown wide open. It was pretty to see the little lions and tigers running home, for all the world like an infant school dismissed to play. The pretty creatures gambolled about for a short while in their cage, and then lay down to rest.

A WONDERFUL PERFORMANCE.

"And now," said Mr. Hagenbeck, "the older animals are coming in to do their performance."