have been," mused the man.

And then the scenes on the disc began to wax and dwindle rapidly; like the momentary clinging, and as rapid vanishing, of breath across a mirror of polished steel.

There was a vague fluttering and interchange of images; an elusive, intangible influx of suggestions, and an equally dreamy efflux of the same.

A young girl growing into beautiful womanhood, well-dressed, shapely, sought eagerly in marriage, admired by the opposite sex, and envied by her own. Then a woman in the prime of her powers of enjoyment—with her charms undiminished and her wishes ripened—wedded, and successfully shaping her life: a woman blessed greatly, and very happy.

And side by side with these dream-fancies, or imaginings, went those of a young man facing the world gallantly; surmounting every obstacle easily, and conquering hearts as if by a spell. There was success for him in every scene on which he entered: he was proud and admired, and very haughty, and very rich.

Presently, as if through some dexterous sleight of hand, the pictures of his wooing blended waveringly and dimly with the pictures which emerged for the bedraggled woman who stood beside the loafer in front of the disc.

In the church, when the wedding-march was being played, and in the vignettes of domestic happiness that ensued, the faces and scenes mysteriously coalesced.

For the two spectators, who watched the shifting pictures breathlessly, there were no longer four figures in the scene, but only two.

"Some such future I had imagined for myself," the man muttered.

And the woman mused amazedly: "These were day-dreams of my own."

The disc became obscured, as if their eyes were blurred mistily.

The woman gulped down something: and the man clenched his teeth.

There was a sudden exquisite clarity in the pictures. They were looking at a cluster of white-washed cottages, with tall thatched roofs and with great stone chimneys: a lonely little hamlet drowsing in the sun. White-winged ducks were quacking in the roadway, a grey-coated donkey was grazing beside a hedge, and the threadlets of smoke, that mounted lazily above the roofs, rose up into a sky of the most exquisite purity, spacious, high, and cloudlessly blue. And again there was only one scene for them both.

"My God, that is where I was born!" groaned the man.

"That's my mother's cottage!" sobbed the woman, and wept aloud.

Then came rural scenes of almost every character, with a lad and a girl moving flittingly through them—laughing and kissing in the lanes among the brambles, drifting together everywhere, sweethearting through it all.

"Are you Nelly King, then?" asked the man, hoarsely.

"And you . . . you are Stephen Laity, are you not?"

"If we could both die here and now!" cried the man.

Then the pictures for a while grew blurred and confused, till presently they shewed the gas-lighted streets of London. . . .

"My God, I will see no more!" cried the girl. And she shudderingly held her hand before her eyes.

"Nor I, either!" cried the man, with an oath.

"However much you close your eyes," said the Showman, "you will cancel nothing of the pictures on the screen."

But they had turned and fled even while he was speaking.

"Even in the fair the pictures will pursue you!" said the stern-visaged Showman, following them with his eyes.

THE MAN WHO DESIRED TO BE
A TREE.