of a tall flower with his stick.

Syme understood his rude impatience and instinctively looked over his
shoulder to see whether the train was coming in sight. But there was no
smoke on the horizon.

Colonel Ducroix knelt down and unlocked the case, taking out a pair of
twin swords, which took the sunlight and turned to two streaks of white
fire. He offered one to the Marquis, who snatched it without ceremony,
and another to Syme, who took it, bent it, and poised it with as much
delay as was consistent with dignity.

Then the Colonel took out another pair of blades, and taking one himself
and giving another to Dr. Bull, proceeded to place the men.

Both combatants had thrown off their coats and waistcoats, and stood
sword in hand. The seconds stood on each side of the line of fight with
drawn swords also, but still sombre in their dark frock-coats and hats.
The principals saluted. The Colonel said quietly, "Engage!" and the two
blades touched and tingled.

When the jar of the joined iron ran up Syme's arm, all the fantastic
fears that have been the subject of this story fell from him like dreams
from a man waking up in bed. He remembered them clearly and in order as
mere delusions of the nerves--how the fear of the Professor had been
the fear of the tyrannic accidents of nightmare, and how the fear of the
Doctor had been the fear of the airless vacuum of science. The first was
the old fear that any miracle might happen, the second the more hopeless
modern fear that no miracle can ever happen. But he saw that these fears
were fancies, for he found himself in the presence of the great fact of
the fear of death, with its coarse and pitiless common sense. He felt
like a man who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices, and had
woke up on the morning when he was to be hanged. For as soon as he had
seen the sunlight run down the channel of his foe's foreshortened blade,
and as soon as he had felt the two tongues of steel touch, vibrating
like two living things, he knew that his enemy was a terrible fighter,
and that probably his last hour had come.

He felt a strange and vivid value in all the earth around him, in the
grass under his feet; he felt the love of life in all living things.
He could almost fancy that he heard the grass growing; he could almost
fancy that even as he stood fresh flowers were springing up and breaking
into blossom in the meadow--flowers blood red and burning gold and
blue, fulfilling th