directed, friend Belphegor, vice may become virtue—enough here to keep the fever from the homestead for three generations....”

The old man moved noiselessly in his slippers across the stone floor, flung a couple of fresh logs on the sinking hearth, then stretched out his frail hands to the blaze and laughed gently. The flame light played fantastically on his shrunken figure:—a being, it would seem, so ætherealised that it scarcely looked as if blood could still be circulating beneath that skin, like yellow ivory, tensely stretched over the vast, denuded forehead and the bold, high-featured face. Mind alone, one would have thought, must animate that emaciated body; mind alone light up those steel-blue eyes with such keenness that, by contrast with the age-stricken countenance, they shone with almost unearthly vitality.

The cat stretched himself, yawned; then advanced, humping his back and bristling, to rub himself against his master’s legs. The fire roared again in the chimney, a score of greedy tongues licking up the last drops of sap that oozed forth, hissing, from the beech logs.

“Aha,” said Master Simon, bending down somewhat painfully to give a scratch to the animal’s neck, “that’s the fire-song you prefer. I fear, I fear, Belphegor, you 6will never rise beyond the grossest everyday materialism!”

6

Purring Belphegor endorsed the opinion by curling up luxuriously on his head and stretching out his hind paws to the flame. The little scene was an allegory of peace and comfort. The old man, straightening himself, remained awhile musing:

“Well, it is good music—a song of the people. All of the stout woods of Bindon, of the deep English earth, of the salt English airs. No subtle virtue in it: a roaring good tune, a homely smell and a heap of ash behind—but all clean, my cat, clean!”

He gathered the folds of his dressing-gown around him; a garment that had once been wondrous fine and set in fashion (in the days of his elegant youth) by no less a person than his present Majesty, King George IV., but now so stained, so singed and scorched and generally faded, that its original hues were but things of memory.

“And now we shall have a quiet hour before supper. What a good thing, my cat, that neither you nor I are attractive to company! The original man was created to be alone. But the fool could not appreciate his bliss, and so he was given a companion—a woman, Belphegor, a woman!—and Paradise was lost.”

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