done."

"Mademoiselle, allow me at least to row the boat."

"It is paddling, and you do not understand it. I do. Please do not
speak until we are out of range. I am horribly frightened."

"You are very, very brave."

"Hs--s--sh."

Miss Stansby wielded the double-bladed paddle in a way a Red Indian
might have envied. Once she uttered a little feminine shriek as a
cannon ball plunged into the water behind them; but as they got further
away from the buoy those on the iron-clads appeared to notice that a
boat was within range, and the firing ceased.

Miss Stansby looked fixedly at the solemn young man sitting before her;
then placed her paddle across the canoe, bent over it, and laughed. De
Plonville saw the reaction had come. He said sympathetically:--

"Ah, Mademoiselle, do not, I beg. All danger is over, I think."

"I am not frightened, don't think it," she cried, flashing a look of
defiance at him, and forgetting her admission of fear a moment before.
"My father was an Admiral. I am laughing at my mistake. It is salt."

"What is?" asked her astonished passenger.

"In your hair."

He ran his fingers through his hair, and the salt rattled down to the
bottom of the canoe. There was something of relief in _his_ laugh.

* * * * *

De Plonville always believes the officers on board the gunboats
recognized him. When it was known in Paris that he was to be married to
the daughter of an English Admiral, whom rumor said he had bravely
saved from imminent peril, the army lieutenant remarked that she could
never have heard him speak her language--which, as we know, is not
true.

A NEW EXPLOSIVE.

The French Minister of War sat in his very comfortable chair in his own
private yet official room, and pondered over a letter he had received.
Being Minister of War, he was naturally the most mild, the most humane,
and least quarrelsome man in the Cabinet. A Minister of War receives
many letters that, as a matter of course, he throws into his waste
basket, but this particular communication had somehow managed to rivet
his attention. When a man becomes Minister of War he learns for the
first time that apparently the great majority of mankind are engaged in
the manufacture or invention of rifles, gunpowders, and devices of all
kinds for the destruction of the rest of the world.

That morning, the Minister of War had received a letter which announced
to him that the writer of it had invent