fresh air of the morning might blow on the face of the dying. The
entrance faced east, and the view to the horizon was unbroken.

"Listen, friends," Julian began, and his voice was low, but clear. "My
hour is come, and like an honest debtor, I am not sorry to give back my
life to nature, and in my soul is neither pain nor fear. I have tried to
keep my soul stainless; I have aspired to ends not ignoble. Most of our
earthly affairs are in the hands of destiny. We must not resist her. Let
the Galileans triumph. We shall conquer later on!"

The morning clouds were growing red, and the first beam of the sun
washed over the rim of the horizon. The dying man held his face towards
the light, with closed eyes.

Then his head fell back, and the last murmur came from his half-open
lips, "Helios! Receive me unto thyself!"

* * * * *

PROSPER MERIMEE

Carmen

Novelist, archaeologist, essayist, and in all three
departments one of the greatest masters of French style of his
century, Prosper Merimee was born in Paris on September 23,
1803. The son of a painter, Merimee was intended for the law,
but at the age of twenty-two achieved fame as the author of a
number of plays purporting to be translations from the
Spanish. From that time until his death at Cannes on September
23, 1870, a brilliant series of plays, essays, novels, and
historical and archaeological works poured from his fertile
pen. Altogether he wrote about a score of tales, and it is on
these and on his "Letters to an Unknown" that Merimee's fame
depends. His first story to win universal recognition was
"Colombo," in 1830. Seventeen years later appeared his
"Carmen, the Power of Love," of which Taine, in his celebrated
essay on the work, says, "Many dissertations on our primitive
savage methods, many knowing treatises like Schopenhauer's on
the metaphysics of love and death, cannot compare to the
hundred pages of 'Carmen.'"

_I.--I Meet Don Jose_

One day, wandering in the higher part of the plain of Cachena, near
Cordova, harassed with fatigue, dying of thirst, burned by an overhead
sun, I perceived, at some distance from the path I was following, a
little green lawn dotted with rushes and reeds. It proclaimed to me the
neighbourhood of a spring, and I saw that a brook issued from a narrow
gorge between two lofty spurs of the