it—aside from certain persons whose lamentable lot must often have wrung a tear from you?

"Imagine living in one of these Paris passages. Think of a consumptive spitting blood and suffocating in a room one flight up, behind the 'ass-back' gables of, say the passage des Panoramas, for instance. When the window is open the dust comes in impregnated with snuff and saturated with clammy exudations. The invalid, choking, begs for air, and in order that he may breathe the window is closed.

"Well, the dust that you complain of is rather milder than that. Anyway I don't hear you coughing.... But if you're ready we'll be on our way."

"Where shall we go?" asked Durtal.

Des Hermies did not answer. They left the rue du Regard, in which Durtal lived, and went down the rue du Cherche-Midi as far as the Croix-Rouge.

"Let's go on to the place Saint-Sulpice," said Des Hermies, and after a silence he continued, "Speaking of dust, 'out of which we came and to which we shall return,' do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy fat bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.

"But this is where we stop."

They had come to where the rue Férou opens into the place Saint-Sulpice. Durtal looked up and on an unenclosed porch in the flank of the church of Saint-Sulpice he read the placard, "Tower open to visitors."

"Let's go up," said Des Hermies.

"What for! In this weather?" and Durtal pointed at the yellow sky over which black clouds, like factory smoke, were racing, so low that the tin chimneys seemed to penetrate them and crenelate them with little spots of clarity. "I am not enthusiastic about trying to climb a flight of broken, irregular stairs. And anyway, what do you think you can see up there? It's misty and getting dark. No, have a heart."

"What difference is it to you where you take your airing? Come on. I assure you you will see something unusual."

"Oh! you brought me here on purpose?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you say so?"

He followed Des Hermies into the darkness under the porch. At the back of the cellarway a little essence lamp, hanging from a nail, lighted a door, the tower entrance.

For a long time, in utter darkness, they climbed a winding stair. Durtal was wondering where the keeper had gone, when, turning a corner, he saw a shaft of light, then he stumbled against the rickety supports of a "double-current" lamp in front of a door. Des Hermies pulled a bell cord and the door swung back.

Above them on a landing they could see feet, whether of a man or of a woman they could not tell.

"Ah! it's you, M. des Hermies," and a woman bent over, describing an arc, so that her head was in a stream of light. "Louis will be very glad to see you."

"Is he in?" asked Des Hermies, reaching up and shaking hands with the woman.

"He is in the tower. Won't you stop and rest a minute?"

"Why, when we come down, if you don't mind."

"Then go up until you see a grated door—but what an old fool I am! You know the way as well as I do."

"To be sure, to be sure.... But, in passing, permit me to introduce my friend Durtal."

Durtal, somewhat flustered, made a bow in the darkness.

"Ah, monsieur, how fortunate. Louis is so anxious to meet you."

"Where is he taking me?" Durtal wondered as again he groped along behind his friend, now and then, just as he felt completely lost, coming to the narrow strip of light admitted by a barbican, and again proceeding in inky darkness. The climb seemed endless. Finally they came to the barred door, opened it, and found themselves on a frame balcony with the abyss above and below. Des Hermies, who seemed perfectly at home, pointed downward, then upward. They were halfway up a tower the face of which was overlaid with enormous criss-crossing joists and beams riveted together with bolt heads as big as a man's fist. Durtal could see no one. He turned and, clinging to the hand rail, groped along the wall toward the daylight which stole down between the inclined leaves of the sounding-shutters.

Leaning out over the precipice, he discerned beneath him a formidable array of bells hanging from oak supports lined with iron. The sombre bell metal was slick as if oiled and absorbed light without refracting it. Bending backward, he looked into the upper abyss and perceived new batteries of bells overhead. These bore the raised effigy of a bishop, and a place in each, worn by the striking of the clapper, shone golden.

All were in quiescence, but the wind rattled against the sounding-shutters, stormed through the cage of timbers, howled along the spiral stair, and was caught and held whining in the bell vases. Suddenly a light breeze, like the stirring of confined air, fanned his cheek. He looked up. The current had been set in motion by the swaying of a great bell beginning to get under way. There was a crash of sound, the bell gathered momentum, and now the clapper, like a gigantic pestle, was grinding the great bronze mortar with a deafening clamour. The tower trembled, the balcony on which Durtal was standing trepidated like the floor of a railway coach, there was the continuous rolling of a mighty

reverberation, interrupted regularly by the jar of metal upon metal.

In vain Durtal scanned the upper abyss. Finally he managed to catch sight of a leg, swinging out into space and back again, in one of those wooden stirrups, two of which, he had noticed, were fastened to the bottom of every bell. Leaning out so that he was almost prone on one of the timbers, he finally perceived the ringer, clinging with his hands to two iron handles and balancing over the gulf with his eyes turned heavenward.

Durtal was shocked by the face. Never had he seen such disconcerting pallor. It was not the waxen hue of the convalescent, not the lifeless grey of the perfume-or snuff-maker, it was a prison pallor of a bloodless lividness unknown today, the ghastly complexion of a wretch of the Middle Ages shut up till death in a damp, airless, pitch-dark in-pace.

The eyes were blue, prominent, even bulging, and had the mystic's readiness to tears, but their expression was singularly contradicted by the truculent Kaiser Wilhelm moustache. The man seemed at once a dreamer and a fighter, and it would have been difficult to tell which character predominated.

He gave the bell stirrup a last yank with his foot and with a heave of his loins regained his equilibrium. He mopped his brow and smiled down at Des Hermies.

"Well! well!" he said, "you here."

He descended, and when he learned Durtal's name his face brightened and the two shook hands cordially.

"We have been expecting you a long time, monsieur. Our friend here speaks of you at great length, and we have been asking him why he didn't bring you around to see us. But come," he said eagerly, "I must conduct you on a tour of inspection about my little domain. I have read your books and I know a man like you can't help falling in love with my bells. But we must go higher if we are really to see them."

And he bounded up a staircase, while Des Hermies pushed Durtal along in front of him in a way that made retreat impossible.

As he was once more groping along the winding stairs, Durtal asked, "Why didn't you tell me your friend Carhaix—for of course that's who he is—was a bell-ringer?"

Des Hermies did not have time to answer, for at that moment, having reached the door of the room beneath the tower roof, Carhaix was standing aside to let them pass. They were in a rotunda pierced in the centre by a great circular hole which had