aps you interfered with him?"

"Well, to tell the truth, I did a little."

"Mr. Montgomery, in such a practice as mine, intimately associated as it
is with the highest and most progressive elements of our small
community, it is impossible--"

But just then the tentative bray of a cornet-player searching for his
key-note jarred upon their ears, and an instant later the Wilson
Colliery brass band was in full cry with, "See the Conquering Hero
Comes," outside the surgery window. There was a banner waving, and a
shouting crowd of miners.

"What is it? What does it mean?" cried the angry doctor.

"It means, sir, that I have, in the only way which was open to me,
earned the money which is necessary for my education. It is my duty,
Dr. Oldacre, to warn you that I am about to return to the University,
and that you should lose no time in appointing my successor."

THE LORD OF CHATEAU NOIR

It was in the days when the German armies had broken their way across
France, and when the shattered forces of the young Republic had been
swept away to the north of the Aisne and to the south of the Loire.
Three broad streams of armed men had rolled slowly but irresistibly from
the Rhine, now meandering to the north, now to the south, dividing,
coalescing, but all uniting to form one great lake round Paris. And
from this lake there welled out smaller streams--one to the north, one
southward, to Orleans, and a third westward to Normandy. Many a German
trooper saw the sea for the first time when he rode his horse girth-deep
into the waves at Dieppe.

Black and bitter were the thoughts of Frenchmen when they saw this weal
of dishonour slashed across the fair face of their country. They had
fought and they had been overborne. That swarming cavalry, those
countless footmen, the masterful guns--they had tried and tried to make
head against them. In battalions their invaders were not to be beaten,
but man to man, or ten to ten, they were their equals. A brave
Frenchman might still make a single German rue the day that he had left
his own bank of the Rhine. Thus, unchronicled amid the battles and the
sieges, there broke out another war, a war of individuals, with foul
murder upon the one side and brutal reprisal on the other.

Colonel von Gramm, of the 24th Posen Infantry, had suffered severely
during this new development. He commanded in the little Norman town of
Les Andelys, and his outposts stretched amid the hamlets and f