"Now," said Jack, "all aboard, and we will head for Hudson Bay, and from there west to the Pacific. The ship rose upwards and headed for the mainland and then north towards the bay.

They made the bay inside of twelve hours. Although a close watch was kept all the way, no signs of any survivors

were seen.

"Hudson Bay," exclaimed Jack as they came in sight of that sheet of water. "At one time The Hudson Bay Company controlled the fur markets of the world and dictated the policies by which Canada was ruled. It was one of the most autocratic concerns that ever existed, but with the passing of animal life, the changing of the climate, which made the wearing of furs unnecessary, this concern went out of existence."

After spending a day and a night around the Hudson Bay country, the airship started for the Pacific Coast, shifting their route in such a way as to cover the whole country as they went along, they were three days crossing the country. After making a two-days' stay in Vancouver, B. C., they decided to head into the United States, land at Seattle, then make their way across country to Boston, covering the part of the country as they went along that had not been covered when the ship left Boston nearly two months previous.

A day was spent looking around Seattle; then the ship zigzagged slowly eastward to the Rockies, where a stay of several days was made. The scenery in the mountains was so grand and beautiful they hated to leave.

"We'll 'cross-lots' to Chicago and stay there two weeks," said Jack.

"Good," cried the others.

Chicago in those days was the most wonderful city in the world and well worth a two-weeks' stay.

They enjoyed themselves immensely in Chicago; there were many wonderful things to see, beautiful art galleries to visit, and they enjoyed sailing over the Great Lakes in some of those marvelous floating palaces that they found deserted

FINIS

at the docks, and some were found where they had stopped in mid-lake or ran ashore and wrecked when the terrible epidemic struck the Great Lakes section. They did not find a single survivor in Chicago or around the Great Lakes.

"We must tear ourselves away from here and start on the last lap of our journey," cried Jack one morning.

"All right," they answered.

Jack started the engines, the ship rose upward and again the big flier began her zigzag journey eastward in hopes of finding some more survivors before reaching Boston. No signs of life were to be seen anywhere and it was concluded they were the only people in the world that had survived the terrible epidemic of "Speedomania."

The entire party took up residences on Commonwealth avenue, Boston. A co-operative form of government was established. Jack was elected Governor, and Rebecca Villa was chosen Lieutenant Governor. Every member of the colony was entitled to a seat in the legislature and there were some lively and interesting sessions at the State House. One of the first acts of the legislature was the consolidation of Harvard, Radcliffe and Simmons Colleges with Boston University, with headquarters at the latter institution because it was centrally lo cated and near Boston's wonderful library. Miss Lucy Thayer was elected President of the Consolidated Universities. Every member of the colony enrolled as a University student, and in time received a degree. The first class day of the University was a jolly affair. It was held on Boston Common, and Villa delivered the Ivy oration.

The colony prospered and increased in numbers from additions of the various families. In the course of three thousand years the world again became pop. ulated, and on account of eugenic marriages, saner and better living, the new generations proved to be a sturdy and happier race than the one that passed out with the great epidemic of "Speedomania."

S

OMEWHERE, probably on the tawny, cactus-covered sands of Mexico, the bones of Ambrose Bierce are blanching under the torrid rays of the sun, while the ominous vulture flaps lazily along glimmering dully beneath the coppery moon as the gaunt, gray wolf, "whose howl's his watch," glides silently, intent on some murderous design, and the skulking coyote yelps his plaintive cry upon the slumbrous, nocturnal air. Or, if by chance some uncouth though kindly hand afforded his body the final service of pickaxe and spade, even so, but little consolation would result therefrom to his friends, for of Bierce, as of Moses, it can be said that "no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." From the time of the battle of Torreon in 1914, when Bierce was on the staff of Villa, his fate has been clouded in mystery, and since he had then already exceeded the limit of days which the Psalmist set for man's mortal pilgrimage, there can be but little question that he has passed into the uncharted regions of the everlasting silence. If his immortality might put on mortality for a brief space of time so that he could return from that undiscovered country, it is probable that he would assure his friends that nothing in his life became him more than the mysterious manner in which he left it; for mystery in a thousand diverse shapes meant more than anything else to him while he lived. So, possibly, Hawthorne, too, might say that fate was very gracious in permitting him to glide softly from the gentle embrace of dreams into that spirit world which was always so much more real to him than mere sensuous existence.

And to Ambrose Bierce, as to Hawthorne, the life of the senses meant comparatively little. His imagination was

forever roving through the boundless, untrammeled stretches of an unearthly, super-sensuous country—

"A wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of Space, out of Time."

His critical writings were indeed pungent and pitiless; he preferred to open wounds rather than to cauterize them; he was an iconoclast, not a constructive reformer; his searing satire, aimed at a multitude of hostile contemporaries, at the fidelity of woman, at church and State, and in general at what he believed to be the many sins of modern society, never admitted of let or hindrance. But because of their very nature, those portions of his writings which were concerned distinctively with social matters of his day are bound to have less and less appeal, and whatever his final rank may be, after the tribulations of several decades have winnowed out all that was strictly ephemeral in his works, he is quite certain to be remembered primarily as an artist who dealt with the uncanny forces that lie outside of life rather than with life itself. He will live, if he lives at all, not as one who had some moral message, some doctrinaire preachment, for his generation, but rather as one who, largely unconcerned with theories of amelioration of any kind whatever, beguiled his life's day by constructing a world almost wholly out of his own fantastic imagination.

Since this world is to a large extent singularly his own, it is fitting that its composition, even though in some degree shapeless and indeterminate, should be subjected to as definite an analysing process as is possible. Right here is where inveterate lovers of literary influences and of the general heritage of the past as it affects our modern writers may have their fling, and dally with such mat

ters to their hearts' desires. With commendable accuracy they may point out that Gothic Romance, initiated in England more than a century and a half ago by Horace Walpole in his crudely supernatural and bloody "Castle of Otranto," which innocently fathered a host of bawling English, Continental and American children during the next few decades, is the literary pigeon-hole in which the works of Ambrose Bierce may be filed for the benefit of gaping college classes forced to endure the pangs of despised required courses in the history of literature. And these critics would be perfectly right in so doing; as right, that is, as are physicists who explain the rainbow to their own satisfaction by affirming that it is merely the result of the refraction of rays of light passing through drops of water. But, though the product of explicable scientific laws, the rainbow is still essentially as much a thing of baffling, poetic splendor as it was when first it leaped across the clouds that covered the vaporous, inchoate mass we now call earth; and the writings of Bierce, indubitably the product of a definite tendency in literature, would still hold the mind in a fascinating grip even if their literary parentage were unknown.

There is, to be sure, some reason for thinking that in Poe and Hawthorne the art of Gothic Romance reached its highest possibilities and that little or nothing of novelty in method or subject matter remains. Certainly the number of presentday pseudo-scientific romanticists, almost all of whom have knelt before the throne of Poe, have given us practically nothing more than countless variations of themes first introduced by him; the great advance in scientific knowledge since Poe's time has surely been accompanied by no similar increase in artistic ability to utilize this new material for fiction. Nor have Hawthorne's tales of the Puritanic conscience working usually amid direful situations been surpassed, and probably not equalled; though it is quite certain that only a very bold person would claim that the morality of the world has advanced, since Hawthorne's time, equally with scientific discovery. But it is just here that Ambrose Bierce must be reck

Form 5

oned with as one who accomplished something that Hawthorne and Poe each did in part, though seldom or never wholly: he took the omnipresent but rarely appalling supernaturalism of Hawthorne, combined with it the almost purely physical horrors of Poe, and thus produced what is virtually a new type of fiction-a type which others have occasionally used, but which perhaps no one previously has made specifically his own. In his best stories he created a world whose beings are absolutely dominated by unreasoning, aboriginal, cosmic fear.

This fear, which constitutes the warp and woof of Bierce's most significant tales, grips the reader almost, if not quite, as powerfully as do Poe's ghastly creations, but it springs from as unearthly sources as do the milder terrors of Hawthorne. At times it manifests itself in at least partially tangible form, but it is most effective when strictly impalpable. It is the fear that twisted the hearts of our most primitive progenitors when first they realized that there were phenomenal forces far more to be shunned and fled from than the ponderous foot of the mammoth or the scimitar-like claws of the cave-lion. It is the fear that left their bodies unscathed, but clutched their minds with paralyzing force. It leaped upon them infinitely swifter than their arboreal enemies. They may have scorned the arrow that flieth by day, but of the terror by night they were woefully afraid. Brute strength and cunning availed them nothing, for it was not a part of the sensuous world. It is the fear and trembling that came upon Eliphaz, the Temanite, in the visions of the night when deep sleep falls upon men, and made all his bones to shake; for a spirit passed before his face. It is the penalty which all mankind must pay for being elevated above the brute world into a sphere where intellectual and emotional processes usurp the place of mere thews and sinews of physical strength. It is a part of the primal curse which, according to the fable, fell upon man be. cause he inquisitively tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Neither adamantine barriers of imponderable granite or marble, nor any "unswept stone be

smeared with sluttish time" can fortify man against it, for it is the fear of the

unseen.

The art of Bierce may be seen at its best in the two volumes entitled "Can Such Things Be?" and "In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians", the latter book having been "denied existence by the chief publishing houses in the country"-a significant commentary on the financial wisdom our publishers show in catering to our deeply ingrained, Anglo-Saxon antipathy to literature or other work done for art's sake only, and our immaculately chaste delight in witnessing the triumphant victory of vapidly orthodox virtues over the sinister forces of iniquity. The works of Bierce, like those of Poe and Whitman, have been read far more sedulously in Europe than in America-another testimonial to the wiser charity of peoples who care less for esoteric morality than they care for eclectic art. It needs no connoisseur of literature to see, in these two books, plenteous traces of ideas garnered from many modern writers. Thus in "A Psychological Shipwreck" the theme is prescience granted in a dream; in "The Realm of the Unreal" it is hypnotism; "One Summer Night," a story less than four pages long, captivates by reason of the horror aroused by premature burial, grave-robbing and murder; and reincarnation is the motif of several tales. Bierce apparently followed De Maupassant, though independently as to subject matter, in the employment of deliberately unconventional beginnings, extremely bizarre situations and smashing climaxes. Thus, "A Jug of Sirup" opens with the laconic statement, "This narrative begins with the death of the hero;" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" details, with a minuteness worthy of Henry James, the introspections of a criminal on the scaffold during the short interval between the adjusting of the noose and the springing of the trap; in "Chickamauga" a child, deaf and mute, wanders through a battlefield splotched with decaying corpses; in "One of the Missing" a soldier, imprisoned by fallen timbers, finds himself staring into the muzzle of his own cocked rifle, and, unable to release himself,

finally dies because of the hypnotic fear inspired by the "menacing stare of the gun barrel," which actually is empty and harmless; in "The Man and the Snake" a man is literally frightened to death by the "unspeakable malignant" eyes of a snake which, as the closing sentence pithily states, was "a stuffed snake; its eyes were two shoe buttons." In "The Boarded Window" a man, alone at night with his supposedly dead wife, suddenly hears a panther trying to drag away the body, but it fails, and the terse ending sentence suggests why, for "between the teeth was a fragment of the animal's ear." Best of all, perhaps, is that superb tour de force in staggering situation, "The Eyes of the Panther," in which prenatal influence, as well as "the menace of those awful eyes," plays a ghastly part. Moreover, the drab realism of Flaubert, and perhaps of the Russian school, is to be seen in such a sentence as this, taken from "Chickamauga": "The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles-the work of a shell." There are crudities in these tales, even in the best of them: Bierce is too fond of the emotion mechanically stirred by the exclamation point, he often strives for shocks at the expense of even remote plausibility; he takes a ghoulish delight in dishing up carrion banquets for his readers; he piles horror on horror, after the manner of those Elizabethan masters of diablerie, Tourneur, Webster, and Ford; but at his best he has an austere reserve and a power of creating an atmosphere of all-enveloping ill unsurpassed, probably, by any writer who has specialized in these two particular literary devices. Furthermore, his stories are commonly interspersed with bursts of humor which, grimly sardonic as it is, still furnishes the emotional relief that the exponents of Gothic art have quite generally failed to give.

It is, however, in those tales which portray the workings of wholly immaterial powers of darkness and evil that Bierce is most original and thrilling, tales in which the usual theme is the return

of menacing wraiths for venegeance denied them in the flesh. In these stories there is practically no use made of sensuous terrors that palsy the senses only; rather, the motivation springs from the infinitely more dreadful horror that arises from the presence of "supernatural malevolences," which far excel the pigmy forces of mere material fright. Bierce is, of course, compelled to use physical metaphors in describing these "invisible existences"-for he regards them as such, and far more powerful than are matter and energy. He portrays a universe shadowed by "one primeval mystery of darkness, without form or void," in which there is "a portentous conspiracy of night and solitude." In "A Watcher By the Dead" and "The Suitable Surroundings," death comes solely from fear of these "supernatural malevolences." In "The Damned Thing," "The Moonlit Road," "Stanley Fleming's Hallucination," "The Secret of Macarger's Gulch," and in "The Death of Halpin Frayser," however, the "accursed beings" work their will by temporarily using physical force. "The Death of Halpin Frayser" is perhaps the best of all Bierce's stories in creating an impression of the incarnate verisimilitude of those "invisible existences that swarm" about the earth. The following poem, taken from this story, is possibly as powerful a piece of unalloyed morbidity as poetic pen ever produced:

The air was stagnant all, and Silence

was

A living thing that breathed among the trees.

"Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,

Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb. With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves

Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.

"I cried aloud!-the spell, unbroken still, Rested upon my spirit and my will.

Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,

I strove with monstrous presages of ill!"

The world of Ambrose Bierce, as pictured in a score or so of his best tales, is a phantasmagorical world, teeming with terrific hallucinations and illusory shades; a world where all familiar things seem to have been swallowed up in some prodigious cataclysm. It is born of an imagination that cared nothing for conventional traditions of right and wrong, but only for pure, disinterested art; an imagination that was totally untouched by any fervor for pragmatic or ethical codes. This world is never subject to principles of cause and effect; it transcends all the properties of physics and chemistry; it cannot be mapped by the aid of compass and surveying instruments. It can be compacted within a single brain, yet it stretches immeasurably beyond the confines of the known universe. Only one form of government it knows the autocracy of forever enthroned Fear, who rules with diabolical pitilessness. No ray of light, save the "darkness visible" that comes from fitful gleams of baleful lightning, ever penetrate the vast funereal gloom that encompasses all its domain; murky night, sable as crape, enshrouds all its labrinthine mazes. Its sere, blasted wolds and bleak plains seem to have suffered a blight more drear and deadly than that wrought by a plague of locusts. It is peopled only by gibbering imps, frantic fiends, sheeted apparitions, ogreish gob. lins, pallid spectres and wan ghosts, who