etch grovelled before me on his stomach.

I had meant to punish him; but he was too broken for chastisement. I
could not send to prison the man who had saved my life among the
pine-trees of Djunis. I wonder if he really thought me dead--not that,
if so, his act was thereby materially palliated. And I thought of two
little sentences which my mother taught me when I was a child: "Judge
not that ye be not judged," and "Lead us not into temptation." I pulled
the man on to his feet and grasped his hand, then with the words, "Give
me my father's watch--good-bye, Andreas. I shall remember all the good
in you, and forget those last bad days." I turned from him, and quitted
the "Concordia" with a lump in my throat that I could not swallow down.

* * * * *

TOLD BY THE COLONEL.

X.

A MATRIMONIAL ROMANCE.

BY W. L. ALDEN.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY R. JACK.

"And by the way," continued the Colonel, "a curious thing about this
Josiah Wilson was that he was married for fifteen years and never had
any wife whatever."

The Colonel had begun a story concerning one Josiah Wilson, which
promised to be interesting, but his incidental allusion to Mr. Wilson's
matrimonial experience awakened our curiosity, and we begged him to
interrupt his narrative long enough to tell us how it came to pass that
Josiah was a married man who never had a wife.

[Illustration: "HOWLED FOR HELP."]

"The marriage laws in the United States," said the Colonel, giving his
chair an increased tilt backwards, which was his usual way of beginning
a fresh anecdote, "are as peculiar in their way as are the divorce laws.
You would think to look at them that they would permit anybody to marry
anybody else in any way that either of them might choose, but for all
that they sometimes make it impossible for a man or a woman to get
married. There was a couple who intended to be married in a balloon,
which is a style of lunacy that is quite fashionable in some parts of
the country, though I can't see why a man should want to risk his neck
in a balloon on his wedding day unless it is that it takes so much
courage to be married at all that a man forgets all about such minor
dangers as are connected with ballooning. The bride, the minister, and
two witnesses of assorted sexes went up in the balloon at the appointed
time, and, naturally, the bridegroom intended to go with them, but he
accidentally caught his foot in a neglected guy-rope,