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and especially for cable shares. The Marquis of Tweeddale, presiding over the meeting of the Eastern Telegraph Company the other day, attributed the fall in the Company's stocks to two causes, viz.-(1) The Marconi experiments in "wireless telegraphy," and (2) the action of the Government with respect to the Company's rates. But surely he did protest too much when he said that it "seemed certain that her Majesty's Government did not anticipate any competition from that quarter, or they would scarcely promote a project such as a cable, or rather two cables, in the Pacific, the cost of which could not be put at less than four millions." The bare idea of the Pacific being crossed "without wires" is too rich, and it is small wonder that it did not enter the brain even of Mr. Chamberlain, although Mr. Henniker Heaton may have it in view in connection with his scheme for "Penny European Telegrams," and sixpenny Indian ones! The chairman of the Atlantic cables took the matter more philosophically, expressing his belief that it would be many a long day before messages were sent in any other way than by the process now adopted, although it was "very sad" that the "wireless telegraph" scare should have diminished the invested value of the very important cable interest "by some millions." But the Marconi boom was well managed all the same, although the painfully uniform success of all the experiments was just a little tedious, and lacked the dramatic element somewhat. A little mild scepticism is a most useful, not to say necessary, quality in dealing with matters of this kind, and if only the newspapers would employ their most unbelieving reporters-"fellows who want to know, you know”— to describe the results of such experiments, they would confer a great benefit on their readers, and on the public at large. No one denies that it is possi

ble to telegraph through space, without wires stretched from point to point, either in the form of an aerial line or a cable. But what practical people are most concerned about is the commercial value of the system, and the possibility of its ever coming into general use for practical purposes. So far, we have had no satisfactory evidence on this point, and sensible people will stick to their telegraph shares.

As we close this article, the air is full of electricity and electrical schemes, while the ships of the naval manœuvres are signalling to each other by means of the Marconi system, and Herr Schaefer, an electrical engineer, who is said to have invented a "new system of wireless telegraphy," has sent messages through space from Trieste to Venice, a distance of forty miles, the messages being read "without difficulty." Just so. But, most wonderful of all, Dr. Steins, a Russian scientist, is said to have invented an apparatus for telephoning without wires, for which he claims that ne "shall be able to speak from London with persons, say, in Antwerp, or even in New York." It is rather a far cry from Antwerp to New York, and we fancy these distances have not been covered telephonically even with wires. But there is a child-like simplicity in the scientist's description of his invention which is quite refreshing: "By the use of this invention, two persons long distances apart, provided they each have my little apparatus, can converse just as easily and distinctly as with our well-known system of wire telephones.

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are not disposed to become "electrified" over every scientific canard, and who have not forgotten that "telegraphing

Good Words.

without wires" was known to their grandfathers!

IN THE DAYS OF THE RED TERROR.

It is probably safe to say that to a great many people the history of the Revolution in France is the history of the Terror in Paris, with perhaps a little of Lyons, Marseilles, and Nantes added without emphasis. As to what passed in the country districts, and in hundreds of provincial towns, there is scant knowledge; and nevertheless it is a tale none the less interesting because the scene is narrower than the huge chaotic struggles of a capital city. It is more human, if less national; more individual and more tragic in its very simplicity. It is not the history of a government,-whatever that government might call itself; it is the chronicle of little towns where each is known to the other-where all suffer, where some triumph, where one or two are heroes and martyrs. It is, no doubt, very small in comparison; but it comes the closer to those who read and look on. Also, it is easier to understand, from the past, how the whole became possible and inevitable.

In St. Malo, for instance, the Revolution had been, to a considerable degree, anticipated and prepared. As a matter of fact, whether to Dukes of Brittany or Kings of France, or any more temporary protectors, St. Malo had always borne her allegiance lightly. Even in theory she owed them little; in practice she paid them less, and withdrew that when it pleased her. It is one of her own historians who records her extraordinary independence from century to century; and he adds:

"She was competed for by princes and remained herself indifferent; all parties had need of her, but she sufficed to herself." Excessive and vain-glorious as this sounds, it is geographically and historically true. During the long religious wars of the League it is an exact statement of her circumstances; she was absolutely self-sufficient, governing herself according to her own good-will as a miniature republic, and recognizing no prince or suzerain whatever, after a fashion that would be laughable, considering her size, were it not so amazing.

The time came, indeed, when the independent spirit of the little city led to an event so strange, so forestalling, to coin a word, that it is difficult to realize by how long a time it preceded the days of the Revolution; for in the wellknown dislike of Saint Malo to all and every sort of domination, she fell so deeply in love with liberty, that when her own bishop came back by sea from Rome, her citizens took him prisoner as he landed, liking his nominal lordship over them as little as any other semblance of rule: "A bishop being no whit better than a governor," as it is written in a letter of the time, "though it is undesirable to kill him, by accident or otherwise." So they arrested him without more ado. and kept him close prisoner in his own cathedral precincts, where he had ample leisure to quarrel with his turbulent Chapter; and when, from the pulpit, the priests of the town inveighed against such treatment, the

Council bade them "hold their peace and be thankful, for it was only in Saint Malo that in these days a man might eat his fill and sleep o' nights without fear of cold steel griping the stomach of him." And presently they further ordered that, to prevent such complaints, no sermons were henceforward to be delivered from the pulpit, but only the gospel to be read aloud, sans tire-lires (without fal-lals).

No; St. Malo was at no time in her history humble towards her superiors. even when she acknowledged them. She was by ancient tradition, by character, and by custom, always in opposition.

When, for example, one Duke of Brittany (it was Francis the Second) sent a troop of men-at-arms to overawe his troublesome subjects, St. Malo opened her gates and let them enter into a silence of empty streets that seemed to promise humility and submission, but when once the portcullis was safely dropped behind them, and there was no possible escape, there swept out from every door and alley, from every corner and court, such a torrent of armed men, of clutching, howling women, that "there was strange meat hung that night in every man's cellar." And when the Duke sent presently a herald to ask how his men-at-arms had fared, having received no further news of them, the citizens hooted at him from their ramparts, and mocked him, crying, "Duke, go seek thy dogs (Duc, cherche tes chiens)!"-which has remained in their speech ever since as an address of infinite derision.

Again, when Anne the Duchess, whom indeed they were supposed to love, found them so unruly and so rebellious that she determined to enlarge and strengthen the castle, not to protect the town, but to constrain it, they demanded of their bishop to excommunicate the men who worked for her, and night after night, with singular indus

try, themselves pulled down the stones that had been built up during the day. Only, since Anne was not a Breton for nothing (and there is her inscription on the tower, Qui-qu'en-grogne, in witness of that,) they met for once their match.

But none the less they continued to guard their liberties and their rights with a jealous independence that was always in arms. In the days of their wealth,--and they threw gold out of windows to beggars in the street!-they were willing to give millions to the King, but the smallest national tax they furiously opposed. Their corsairs fought for their own hand and St. Malo, and only accepted as an indifferent compliment the thanks of France. For it was only in rebellion that the Malouins grew patriotic; up to a certain period, "their country was neither Brittany, nor France, nor England, but in return for service rendered, they deigned to accept the protection of that power which for the moment was in preponderance," which means, to put it more crudely than her historian, that St. Malo had a knack of being on the winning side; and that while by accident or circumstance they might call themselves French or Breton, they were at all times only Malouin at heart.

Turbulent, proud, independent, holding their heads so high in the world that it seems a wonder they did not tumble off their little rock-city into the surrounding sea, this is what the Malouins were from the beginning of their history. It seemed but a very small step further than they had already gone to accept in theory the Revolution; but they had not foreseeen the Terror. And yet, in spite of them, the Terror came to St. Malo.

It would be too long and infinitely repugnant to tell in detail the story of that sorrowful time; if, indeed, apart from its greater facts, it can ever be fully known. It is only here and there

that one catches glimpses of the smaller lives that were uncelebrated, unremarked, and that yet were martyrdoms; the little tragedies perhaps of women who prayed in their churches till they were thrust out of them, who prayed on the church-steps till they were imprisoned, who prayed in their cells till they were done to death. It did not occur to them that they could do anything but pray; it was habit, perhaps, but a habit we call heroism. And in all the country-side there were priests, some of them old and ill, who were driven into hiding, proscribed, hunted, expelled, tortured with every sort of suffering and peril. Here is an extract from a letter written by one, a poor man, the son of a laborer, very simple, very unlearned:

Thrice I was torn by force out of the pulpit, hiding as I could about my parish. I slept more often with the pigs than in the cottages. Sometimes I found crusts of bread hidden in the hollows of trees; oftener, I went hungry. Men were paid to track us, dogs trained to hunt us by scent, watches were set at night in the ways where we might pass; once I was chased from dawn to dusk, with houses burning and guns firing on every side so that I could not tell where to go, and the next day I found four priests and ten or twelve of our friends who had helped us, lying dead in the pastures about me. It was seldom I was able to sleep; I had no time to be ill. . . And yet, when I saw women and children flying in fear of their lives; when our poorest peasants grudged themselves bread and water that they might have something to spare for those that were in hiding; when I saw them creeping by night, at risk of worse than death, to pray at the foot of the cross or on the steps of a locked chapel; -oh, then it seemed to me that I ought to have suffered more, much more, to be worthy of them.

There is a plain stone cross on the dyke that joins St. Malo to the main

land, a cross of granite, about which hang many memories. One is a legend of the days when the English were a terror in the land, a story of love and parting and waiting, ending in death; but there is another that ends also in death, and this one is true. For during the Chouannerie sixty-eight prisoners, taken at Dol, were brought to St. Malo; the women and children were left under guard outside the walls, the men shut into the church of St. Sauveur within the town. But at ten of the next morning they were reunited on the beach immediately below this cross, where they were set in a long line, their backs against the wall of the dyke, their faces turned towards the sea, while the firing party loaded their guns. It is recorded that one of the prisoners, a little boy ten years old, let his hat be carried away by the wind and chased it till he was knee-deep in the water; "whereat the great number of people looking on laughed very joyously." Then the firing began. It lasted twenty minutes; when it was finished, the great tumbrils that stood ready were loaded and driven, leaving a trail of blood all along the road they passed over, to the cemetery, where the bodies were thrown into a pit. It is said-and no wonder!-that sometimes on the beach at nightfall one can still hear the sobbing of children, the prayers of women, and the curses of men, mingling with the sound made by the waves as they run up the sand towards the granite cross.

There is another story of those days that is worth telling, if only for the sake of one who plays a part in it, the story of the great Chouan conspiracy, which might have altered the fate of France, the history of Armand de la Rouérie and Thérèse de Moellien.

Armand was such a man as such times are apt to bring forth; so full of what his country call initiative that he had been a little of many things before

he became a leader of Chouans, the accredited agent and lieutenant of the King in this part of High Brittany. He had been, for instance, an officer in the Guards; he had been also, for a time, a Trappist monk; he had held a post of some importance in the army of Lafayette. It is said by his adversaries that under the Monarchy he was a Parliamentarian; it is certain that under the Republic he was the most devoted of Royalists, and served his cause to the death. And the story of that death is a pitiful one.

If

He had already been denounced as a conspirator, and was already more or less in hiding; at this time he had his headquarters, as one may call them, at the Château du Fosse-Hingant at St. Coulomb, midway between St. Malo and Cancale. It was then the the home of Marc Désilles, whose son André, the hero of Nancy, had flung himself in front of a cannon as it was fired, to check an insurrection among his soldiers; whose daughter, Madame de la Fonchais, was presently to become sorrowfully famous; whose niece, Thêrèse de Moellien, was the Flora Macdonald of the Malouin country-as beautiful, as romantic, as devoted as she. Armand de la Rouérie was the head of the conspiracy, she was its heart; she went from house to house, from farm to farm, from cottage to cottage, emptying her purse among the poor, urging the cause of the King, helping with all her courage, her faith, her beauty, to build up that great enterprise which might have changed the history of France. "She was so good, so innocent, we knew that what she told us must be right," the peasants said of her; she seemed to them then, and much more afterwards, a little saint of God. And presently, as one declares of her who tells the story, she was to be called the Angel of the Chouannerie.

They had all met in the large low

hall of the Fosse-Hingant, for the time had almost come when the sign was to be given which would set all Brittany under arms, to make of their enterprise not a series of small independent outbreaks, but the uprising of a great disciplined army under its appointed leaders, with a concerted and prearranged plan of campaign. But just when they should have been most sure of themselves, there had fallen upon them a strange and overwhelming discouragement and depression; they had with one accord unbuckled their swords and flung them upon the table in sign of abandonment and withdrawal. They urged Armand de la Rouérie to fly to Jersey from the peril that surrounded him; they had even gone so far as to have a fishing-boat ready and in waiting for his passage. And Armand had dropped his head upon his hands, and listened, in the midst of those who had failed him, desperately alone.

Suddenly a voice was heard among them, so timid and clear and young, that it sounded like the voice of a child; that yet grew stronger as it went on, and gathered such a force into it as seemed miraculous. "It was like a trumpet or a bell ringing the tocsin," said one who heard it; "and yet it made me think of my mother singing an old song of war to me as a lullaby." One does not know what she said; but when Thérèse de Moellien had finished, Armand de la Rouérie was standing with his head high and a new light in his eyes, and the men about the table had seized their swords and were swearing to follow him to the death.

But that night in the large low hall of the Fosse-Hingant there was a traitor, and before the sign could be given that meant war, word had been sent to Danton, the agents of the Terror were on the track, and Armand began that last long flight that was to end for him only in death. It is a flight in which one cannot follow him; no one but

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