t the sallow youth on his right hated him with a
deadly hatred.

December came--a dull, gray, bitter December--not clear and sparkling,
as December sometimes is, nor yet misty and warm, as if it would have
you take it for a lingering autumn, but bitter without beauty, harsh and
pitiless. Keen gusts of wind whirled dust and straws and rubbish in
dreary little dances along Bellevue street, the faces of the passers-by
were nipped and miserable with the cold, and the sullen sky hung low
above the pallid row of houses opposite. Percival looked out on this and
thought of Brackenhill, which he left in leafy June. He was very
miserable: he had always been quickly sensitive to the beauty or
dreariness around him, and the gray dulness of the scene entered into
his very soul. Warmth, leisure, sunlight and blue sky! There was plenty
of sunlight somewhere in the world. O God! what had he done that it
should be denied him?

There was a weary craving upon him that might have led to terrible
results, but his pride and fastidiousness saved him. His delicately
cultivated palate loathed the coarse fire of spirits, and he had a
healthy horror of drugs. Once or twice he had thought of opium when he
could not escape, even in dreams, from the grayness of his life. "This
is unendurable," he would say; and he played in fancy with the key which
unlocks the gates of that strange region lying on the borders of
paradise and hell. But his better sense questioned, "Will it be any more
endurable when I have ruined my nerves and the coats of my stomach?" It
did not seem probable that it would be. If death had been the risk he
might have faced it, but he recoiled from the thought of a premature and
degraded old age, still chained to the hateful desk.

There are times when a man may be cheaply made into a hero. What would
not Percival have given for the chance of doing some deed of reckless
bravery?

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

A LEVANTINE PICNIC.

We had been a long time in Suda Bay--one of the numerous indentations on
the north coast of Crete--in company with Turkish, Egyptian, Russian and
Austrian men of war. Fighting was going on at intervals on the
mountains--of which Mount Ida and some of the other peaks were covered
with snow--and we could sometimes see from our anchorage the spirts of
white smoke where the Cretans (not "slow-bellies" now) were ambushing
the Turkish columns as they struggled up the mountain-defiles. Egyptian
transports cam